Op-Ed: Cyclone Idai need not have taken so many lives By Tony Weaver
My heart goes out to the battered and bruised people of Mozambique, the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe, and southern Malawi. Cyclone Idai, which hammered in last week, and which is now still hovering, not moving much, has wrought untold destruction.
Or the unnamed cut-off low-pressure system that hit KZN on 28 September 1987 that was one of the most disastrous storms ever to hit South Africa. It caused far more damage than Domoina and killed 506 people across the province. More than 50,000 people were left homeless, and some areas received up to 900mm of rain – just short of a metre – in four days.
In Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands, and particularly the Chimanimani Mountains, illegal diamond and gold mining has stripped bare hillsides in the precipitous mountain range, and early reports are that many of the dead and missing are in villages engulfed by landslides. They have all positioned their houses well inland from the coast in the sheltering lee of the endless dune fields and coastal thicket forests that line the Mozambican coast. It is only the South African lodges that are built right on the beach or perched on the dunes overlooking the endless beaches.
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