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An Upington town planner posting regular photographs on social media of the flooded Orange River swallowing his front garden is documenting the extent of the flood using a flight of stairs leading up from the water as his yardstick.
Len Fourie says sometimes two or three steps of the 29-step path disappear in a matter of hours — and there are now only four left above water as the level continues to rise.
The river, which has come down in flood due to heavy summer rainfall, has also almost engulfed a gate on the stairs and looks set to breach the high-water mark set in the beginning of 2022.
“At our house we have 29 steps from the bottom of our grass all the way down to the Orange River,” Fourie told TimesLIVE Premium. “In normal times, the river falls below the 29th step and is about 1m in depth [measured at the main bridge over the Orange River not far from our home],” Fourie said. However, as of Tuesday only four steps were still visible, and the water level still rising. “Due to the fact that the river rose so quickly, we some days lost three to four steps below the water in a matter of hours. At one time I measured about a step an hour and this was alarming for many people,” said Fourie, whose posts have become somewhat of an unofficial measure of the flood. Twelve steps disappeared in 24 hours on November 17 and 18.
I started with the photos of the steps for myself and when I posted them on Rainfall SA they soon became a point of measurement for countless people in and about Upington and lower down the stream.
— Len Fourie of Upington
The river is now 7m high with a flow or 3,600 cubic metres a second, about 36 times its normal flow. Some riverfront vineyards and riverfront resorts have flooded.
Fourie was surprised by the reaction to his photographs and videos, which have attracted attention. “I started with the photos of the steps for myself, and when I posted them on Rainfall SA they soon became a point of measurement for countless people in and about Upington and lower down the stream. So, when the level is on a specific step, downstream they know that is higher or lower than for example 2021 or beginning of the year.”
The yardstick “trappies”, as they have come to be known, have become particularly valuable to local residents in the absence of reliable data as the department of water affairs measuring station is out of order.
“I can’t wait for these updates,” Carol Hough Lourens posted on Facebook. “Sjoe! That’s high!” said a post in response to the latest image of the stairs.
The inadvertent star of the show is Fourie’s dog Bella, a Basset, featured standing on the stairs in some of the posts. “She has a fascination with the river and anything that lives in it,” Fourie said of his beloved pet who is enjoying the emergence of many creatures fleeing the water. “When the water comes up, so too do all the creatures that normally stay in the banks — snakes and legavaans. This intrigues her,” he said.
The water levels are still way below the record floods of 1988 and 1974 when the water rose to 9.9m and 9.4m respectively.
High rainfall across much of the interior, from Mpumalanga to the Free State, has seen major flooding along river courses and adjacent to the Vaal Dam, with many people forced to evacuate homes. Water officials have opened sluice gates to relieve dam pressure, elevating the water-level downstream.
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