Heavy rains and flooding have killed at least 341 people in South Africa’s eastern KwaZulu-Natal province, including the city of Durban, and more rainstorms are forecast in the coming days.
The death toll is expected to rise as scores of people, including whole families, are missing, officials said Thursday.
The persistent rains have wreaked havoc in the province, destroying homes, collapsing buildings and washing away major roads.
Peter, more weather related crap!
Yeah, record-breaking weather events have nothing to do with climate!
“Durban floods: Is it a consequence of climate change?
But experts at SAWS say severe and extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and more extreme as a result of climate change.
“In other words, heavy-rain events – such as the current incident – can rightfully be expected to recur in the future and with increasing frequency,” the agency says.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/61107685
“When months’ worth of rain falls in one day, it is a fair assumption that decades of fossil fuel burning are partly to blame.
When 300 people die in the resulting carnage, it is not enough to point to climate change. You have to ask: why were so many living in the path of danger? Why did they have no safe place to go? Where were the warning messages?”
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2022/04/14/no-red-alert-300-dead-climate-weekly/
“Why are so many living in the path of danger?”
Sorry, but in the context of record-smashing rainfall, few would have considered it the “path of danger”. Just as with the centuries-old communities in Germany that were torn through by the flash floods in 2021, there were no precedents to tell them it would happen. Consider the many millions living on or near the US Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Are they all “in the path of danger”? How about people in San Francisco and Tehran, on active lateral faults: Why are they living there? And the people living downstream of dams which could potentially collapse or in wooded areas that can burn or in the path of the Piedmont winds that blow fires through Boulder area communities? Consider also the heat dome causing deaths in British Columbia.
The trick, of course, is to find a place on this planet that would never be “in the path of danger”. I’m planning to move further north, away from the increasing central Texas heat, and inland from the worst of hurricane winds, and while I plan to live on higher ground, I still expect my future community to be hit by rain bombs and possibly long deep freezes or derechos.