Dozens of people were killed in South Africa, including several children whose school bus was swept away by flash floods, as unusually heavy rain, snow and wind pummeled parts of the country’s Eastern Cape Province this week.
A slow-moving storm raged over the largely rural province on Monday and Tuesday, drowning homes and leaving thousands of residents displaced, without water or electricity, according to local officials and the national power utility.
On Wednesday, the authorities were still searching for four children who had been on the school bus. Eleven children had been riding the bus on Tuesday, when it was swept off a bridge in the town of Mthatha. Three children from the bus were rescued after they clung to trees for hours, while four others and two adults were killed, local officials said.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the province’s premier, Oscar Mabuyane, said 49 people had been killed. While the worst of the weather has passed, officials said, they fear the toll could rise as many people remain unaccounted for.
“Disasters have hit our province, but we have never experienced this combination of torrential rain and snow,” Mr. Mabuyane said.
This extreme winter weather came as a cold front crawled across the country, driven by a phenomenon called a cutoff low. A cutoff low is a storm system that becomes detached from the fast-moving air currents that usually guide weather systems. As a result, it becomes slow-moving and can linger over one area for several days. (A cutoff low was similarly involved in the devastating rainfall that flooded the province of Valencia, Spain, to deadly effect last fall.)
“This type of anomaly is not abnormal for us, where we have a single event that is producing more rainfall and then becoming drier for a longer time,” said Tokelo Chiloane, a senior weather forecaster at the South African Weather Service.
But this week’s storm drenched the province with an unusual amount of precipitation. One weather station in the Eastern Cape region recorded 9.4 inches of rain over a 24-hour period Monday night into Tuesday. That’s about twice the average total rainfall that the province typically gets from June through August, Ms. Chiloane said.
In Mthatha, hundreds have been displaced and are being housed in community halls, according to local officials.
Rescue teams have been dispatched from surrounding areas to reinforce emergency operations in the most heavily affected places.
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Mr. Mabuyane said critical resource shortages continued to compromise emergency-response capabilities in the region.
“It’s a question that we’ve been reporting every time we experience disasters,” he said. “We now know, at least for the last two years or so, that we are a disaster-prone province. The area that is under-resourced is the eastern part of the province.”
Aerial surveillance and aquatic search teams, including divers, are combing the areas hit by floods. In those most affected, water levels were almost 10 feet high, flowing over the rooftops of big houses, Mr. Mabuyane said.
“It’s bad,” he said. “It is terrible.”
Nazaneen Ghaffar contributed reporting from London.
