When the floods came down a second time, Arne Muller sought sanctuary in a graveyard.
Muller, 49, who farms on the Gourits River in the Little Karoo, first heard reports of heavy rain upstream on May 5, a Tuesday. A day later she watched the water rise ominously.
It rained for two days and at night she could hear the river grinding away at the bank in front of her ancient farmhouse, where she lives with her five cats. “It sounded like little earthquakes,” she said. “And the window panes began to rattle.” It also brought the riverbank from 32 strides away to 12 strides closer to her home.
By the end of the week the rain appeared to ease, but it was an illusion. A second flood came, followed by more rain in the Swartberg mountains to the north, and then a third. Even by the second, Muller considered evacuating; she began packing her more valuable items.
Neighbours offered her refuge, but Muller wanted to keep watch. She retreated to a small family cemetery a few hundred metres from her home, at the foot of a koppie on higher ground. The cats, who had shared her anxieties by refusing to eat — even rare tuna treats — stayed home. Her fear was that they might try to follow her.
Muller set up an outpost on the back of her bakkie next to the graves. She was soaked, but her love of hiking and camping steeled her against the elements. “I’m an outdoor chick,” she says, with a hint of toughness.
From her lookout, even in the dark, she could see the tall dead tree next to her house; it would serve as a marker. In the end, the tree remained standing, as did her home. Nevertheless, it was “vreesaanjaend”, an Afrikaans word that even the English equivalents of “terrifying” or “scary” fail to convey.
Muller’s anguish was shared by many South Africans caught up in the recent storms that claimed a reported 30 lives. Those experiences could be yet another lesson on how we treat the environment, and our rivers especially.
The recent floods are a one-in-a-hundred-year phenomenon, ‘if not slightly larger’
— Cate Brown, river scientist
The Gourits, which is three times bigger than the Breede River’s catchment area, is part of the Breede-Gourits water management area that covers 53,140km². River scientist Cate Brown, an authority on the Breede, says the recent floods are a one-in-a-hundred-year phenomenon, “if not slightly larger”.
“We haven’t seen flows like that in the basin since 1925 and, in some cases, 1909,” she says. “The sums on the amount of rain that falls relative to runoff haven’t been done yet, but we know that those catchments are changing.”
She says more of the water now runs off than before because the natural vegetation has been stripped. It also depends on when it rains. “When the wheat is harvested, [the rain] is hitting bare soil. So it is washing off the catchment more quickly.”
She says in many cases farmers haven’t respected natural buffer zones on the smaller drainage lines that run through their properties. “They plough right through it. And that means the water is going to run off far quicker. If you slow the water down, it soaks in.”
A buffer zone is trees and plants that naturally occur along a river. “They’re very good with things like flooding and holding soil. A lot of them will lie down flat; others have extensive root systems that will bind soil. One of the biggest problems we have is the removal of these buffer zones,” says Brown.
She says an added problem is that for many years wetlands were seen as wastelands. Wetlands act as brakes on a flood, she says, but filling them up and using them for crops negates their natural role.
“A river doesn’t like to go straight,” says Brown. “Because it picks up too much energy, and when it picks up too much energy, it causes too much damage.”
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