Brettonwood High School in Durban is managing its expectations about assistance from the KwaZulu-Natal department of education after suffering extensive flood damage for the second year in a row.
The Umbilo-based school is one of at least 10, heavily affected by the torrential rain and heavy winds that engulfed parts of the province last week.
Along with the damage to hundreds of homes as well as infrastructure, the torrential rain didn’t spare schools.
School governing body chairperson Sandile Dlamini said their initial report showed the damage emanated from the overflowing of the nearby Umbilo River.
“Everything points to the river behind the school as the source of this devastation. Its overflow collapsed the school fencing and it just got worse: some classes were flooded, while the grounds were waterlogged,” said Dlamini.
The damage includes flooded classrooms, including a mobile classroom that was washed away by the force of the water, a waterlogged sports field, the swimming pool, netball court and other sports facilities.
Having been one of the hardest hit schools during the April 2022 floods, last Tuesday’s storm posed a massive setback in the school’s recovery efforts.
Ward 33 councillor Sakhile Mngadi, who visited the school and surrounding areas, said the latest setback was “catastrophic” because the school had made a lot of ground in rehabilitating the damage suffered last year.
“What I found there is nothing short of what I found last year. The damage is extensive, some of the lower levels have been completely destroyed again, as well as some of their fields. The principal told me that they had been just handed over a donation for the netball field, but 24 hours later that was also damaged,” he said.
“It was making inroads in trying to recover from the April floods of last year, so to see it in this state is devastating.”
They (KZN education department) haven’t come on board much, to tell you the truth. The progress we had made before this incident was solely from donors and the funds from the school
— Ward 33 councillor Sakhile Mngadi
Mngadi said the Umbilo canal was the source of the devastation to the school and the whole lower end of the Umbilo park area.
“If you look along the road there is a clear watermark which shows when the storm was at its most intense the water rose to cover the road side of this area.
“The pedestrian bridge has been damaged again, it’s tilted. It was already damaged, but it’s worse now and that poses a risk for pupils,” he said.
“The situation is grave and the city needs to come on board now because we can’t have the school picking up the pieces, only to find that on the side of the municipality, where we were supposed to intervene, nothing is happening,” he said.
“We’re just lucky that this happened during the school holidays, I can only imagine if it was a normal day and the pupils were here. They may have been trapped. So the city needs to look at what it’s going to do to manage the Umbilo canal and the damage that it’s causing to the lower end of the Umbilo park area.”
Mngadi said he recently submitted a community infrastructure projects budget, which would now need to be reprioritised because of the extent of the damage and subsequent costs which could run into millions.
The KwaZulu-Natal education department is expected to adjust its budget to assist the affected schools.
“They haven’t come on board much, to tell you the truth. The progress we had made before this incident was solely from donors and the funds from the school,” Mngadi claimed.
Education department spokesperson Muzi Mahlambi said the department had previously delivered mobile classrooms — most of which were damaged during last week’s storm — and they’re at an advanced stage of presenting a more permanent solution.
“We are attending to it right now and we’ve made progress: we are appointing contractors. Our intervention so far is we gave them mobile classes last year, but we’re in the process of making a more permanent intervention,” he said.
“As long as the school so close to Umbilo River, we will have the same problem over and over again.
“It’s so close to that river which also fills up so quickly. They have the same problem as the licensing department that also closed for a considerable time after last year’s floods,” he said.
The department is still assessing the extent of the damage to the rest of the schools.
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