What we’ve got here is failure to communicate (and to plan, and to act timeously)
who knows rivers like a migrating goose knows its way home, so when he tells me about rivers and dams I listen.
The disaster is simply a failure to act, followed by another to communicate. After a long wet season, the Vaal Dam is already full. Its sluice gates should have been opened when the rains started in earnest two weeks ago, to ease the pressure on the wall as the reservoir’s level rose to 110%. On Tuesday it stood at 118%.
One of the world’s great myths is that dams are built to control floods and yet here we are, again, watching a flood caused by a dam. My dad used to call South Africa “the lucky country”, always stepping back from the brink of disaster at the last second. But what was brinkmanship before now increasingly looks like Russian roulette with six rounds in the chamber instead of one, while the people living along the muddy banks of the Vaal are the ones catching stray bullets in the back.
Parys was left under water after some of the Vaal Dam’s sluice gates were opened at the weekend. Picture: Veli Nhlapo
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