At least 7 people have died and schoolchildren were swept away as floods and snow hit South Africa
A bus carrying high school students was swept away in the floods in the Eastern Cape province and an unknown number of children were missing, the provincial government said in a statement. Three children were rescued after they clung onto trees, according to the South African National Taxi Council, which said the bus was operated by one of its members.
Disaster response teams have been activated in the province on the south coast.
Six people died in flooding in the Eastern Cape city of Mthatha, where houses and cars were left submerged. A seventh body was recovered near the town of Tsolo, around 40 kilometers (25 miles) northwest of Mthatha, the provincial government said.
It said a search was underway for the minibus carrying schoolchildren that was swept away on Tuesday morning. SANTACO, the taxi council, said it was unclear how many children there were on the 22-seater bus when it was swept away by floodwater at a bridge near Mthatha.
'Eyewitnesses at the scene reported seeing at least three (children) clinging to trees and calling for help,' SANTACO said. 'The three have since been rescued.'
Eastern Cape Premier Oscar Mabuyane said 'this is a devastating reminder of nature's force.'
Another five people were killed in a car crash in the Eastern Cape on Tuesday when a minibus taxi overturned, according to provincial transport department spokesperson Unathi Binqose. He said the driver of the minibus was attempting to avoid a tree that had fallen onto the road.
The South African Weather Service has forecast several days of disruptive rain and snow for the Eastern Cape and the neighboring KwaZulu-Natal province along the east coast. Part of a major highway connecting the two provinces was closed because of snow and disaster response teams were also activated in KwaZulu-Natal.
South Africa occasionally experiences snow in some parts, but authorities had warned for days that a particularly strong cold front was about to hit the country.
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Patrick Devine, a captain for Boston Harbor City Cruises, shows me on his phone the scenes here in September 2024. The water was ankle-deep outside the door to his office on Long Wharf, one of the US city's oldest piers, obscuring the pavements and walkways, surging into buildings and ruining vehicles in the car parks. 'It just gets worse and worse each year,' says Devine, who has worked here, on and off, since 1995. 'I've gotten used to it, so it's just knowing your way around it.' Much of Boston has got used to this. Devine has his own supply of sandbags now, for example. Next door to his office is the Chart House restaurant – when Long Wharf flooded last September, customers merrily sat at outside tables, holding their feet above the waterline, as servers with black bin bags for trousers waded over to bring them their lunches. The restaurant's floor level is lower than that of the wharf, so the water came up to knee level in some areas. 'It's just part of business,' says one waiter, as he points out how the plug sockets are all at waist height. The place has flooded three times in the year he's worked here. 'We just clean it up, squeeze it out, open the doors, dry it out. It is what it is.' In Boston they call them 'wicked high tides', also known as king tides – when the moon is at its closest to the Earth and pulling in the same direction as the sun, creating a tide 60 to 120cm (2-4ft) higher than usual. Combined with rising sea levels, fiercer storms and higher precipitation, events like this are making the climate crisis a visible threat in the city. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Boston experienced 19 days of flooding in 2024; it is expected to be similar this year. Unless things change, sea levels here are projected to be 20cm higher than 2000 levels by 2030, 46cm higher by 2050, and a metre or two higher by 2100. Boston is by no means the only US city at risk, but it is very much on the frontline of a problem America seems determined to ignore. Flash flooding killed more than 130 people in Texas this month, but the Trump administration remains in denial about the climate emergency. It has removed vital data (such as previous national climate assessment reports), funding and personnel from important agencies such as the NOAA, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema). In January, Trump proposed 'getting rid of' Fema altogether; he has axed a quarter of its staff since he became president. Even TV weather presenters are warning that the cuts have reduced their ability to track and predict hurricanes and storms, and they are now 'flying blind'. Meanwhile, Fema's new acting head, David Richardson, reportedly told staff members last month he did not even know the US had a hurricane season. Boston may be more vulnerable than most cities, but it is also leading the way in preparedness. In 2016, the city released a comprehensive report, Climate Ready Boston, assessing its vulnerabilities to coastal and storm flooding and extreme heat. Last August, city mayor Michelle Wu set up the US's first dedicated Office of Climate Resilience (OCR). 'We needed an office solely focused on delivering climate resilience infrastructure, because otherwise it won't get done,' says Brian Swett, the city's new chief climate officer. We meet at a cafe in East Boston, just across the water from Long Wharf, along with OCR director Chris Osgood, and councillor Gabriela Coletta Zapata, who represents this vulnerable district. 'I have residents that live right on the waterfront that are soon going to be displaced if we don't do something,' she says. Sea levels are rising globally, due to thermal expansion and the melting of glaciers and polar ice (caused by global heating as a result of CO2 emissions from fossil fuels), but the east coast of the US experiences higher rises than other areas. As Swett explains: 'The Gulf of Maine is the fastest-warming body on Earth, so we tend to have significant expansion of water, plus fairly high variation between low and high tide.' Also, Boston harbour faces north-east, so it bears the brunt of 'nor'easters' – the infamously powerful storms that hit New England, which the climate emergency is making ever stronger. In 1768, British soldiers disembarked here to take control of the city (it didn't work out so well: the Boston Tea Party came five years later). Today, the threat coming down the pier is harder to counter: the sea itself. At the same time, the city is sinking. Sea levels have risen 25cm over the past century but half of that is from subsidence. What's now downtown Boston was a small peninsula at the mouth of three rivers, surrounded by tidal wetlands. Since the 18th century, Bostonians have filled in the harbour and the riverbanks, usually by simply dumping soil and waste material to just above the level of high tide. This landfill has compacted over time, so when high tides sweep in or it rains heavily, the water has nowhere to go. Downtown Boston is no stranger to huge puddles. Hurricane Sandy, in October 2012, was a wake-up call, says Swett. According to reports, it killed 97 people within a 65-mile radius of New York City, destroying thousands of homes and cars, and registering the highest tides ever recorded in Manhattan. Had Sandy hit Boston, it would have been even more catastrophic. 'It wasn't 300 miles of a miss; it was five hours,' Swett says. 'If it had been at our high tide, which was five hours earlier, we would have had a 100-year flooding event in Boston.' There have been more wake-up calls since. In January 2018, a 'bomb cyclone' swept snow and seawater far into the slushbound city, bringing ice floes, garbage bins and even cars with it. 'There's pictures of people kayaking in the street,' recalls councillor Zapata. A similar storm hit again three months later. It isn't only the old parts of the city that are vulnerable. In 2010, the Seaport district, a $3bn waterfront redevelopment in south Boston covering 20 city blocks, was greenlit under a previous administration, with no consideration for future sea-level rises – despite warnings and protests. Already it floods regularly. Home to corporate headquarters and grand public buildings such as the Institute of Contemporary Art, its developers attempted to brand it the 'innovation district' but its critics call it 'inundation district'. A 2021 report predicted that all of Seaport's buildings and 90% of its roads were at risk of becoming inoperable by the mid-21st century as a result of flooding – a cautionary tale for other cities. Boston's current climate resilience plan consists of more than 100 projects along the city's 47-mile coastline between now and 2070. On the broad scale, the strategy is to identify critical points where seawater could flood in and effectively plug them up, but not at the expense of civic life. Zapata says: 'The harbour itself is a treasure, and anybody, no matter who you are, where you come from, should have access to that waterfront.' So rather than sea walls, the city is building elevated public parks and promenades, which bring added social benefits. Boston has also updated its building codes. Standard practice in the US has been to set regulations according to the worst historical flooding; here, they're working to an assumption of a one-metre sea-level rise some time in the future. 'That's the standard that every new building in that future flood zone has to be prepared for,' says Swett. We take a walk to see what this looks like in practice. This part of East Boston was redeveloped in 2019, to the new guidelines. Before, it was industrial wasteland – former shipyards. 'This is where I learned how to drive a car, because nobody was down here,' says Zapata. At first glance, it looks like any other new neighbourhood, apart from the yellow street signs warning, 'ROAD MAY FLOOD' (it did, indeed, flood here last year, Zapata points out). On closer inspection, the ground-floor level of the apartment blocks is about a metre above street level (and three metres above actual sea level). Swett points out solid steel flanges attached to the sides of the entrances to the underground car parking – if a flood is imminent, a barrier can be slotted into them to stop water getting in. Further along the waterfront is a new section of Piers Park, which opened in 2023. Again, it looks like an ordinary park at first glance, with great views of the Boston skyline across the water, but it is higher than the older park and the streets behind it – effectively a sea wall in disguise. 'It doubles as a way to fortify the coastline, but it brings so many families here, celebrating birthdays, christenings,' says Zapata. 'It's awesome.' Another aspect of Boston's grand plan is to use nature-based defences where possible, working with local groups such as the Stone Living Lab, a partnership between government agencies, universities and non-profit bodies such as Boston Harbor Now. 'We're doing more what's often called green infrastructure, instead of grey,' says Joe Christo, co-director of Stone Living Lab. Christo was working for mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York when Hurricane Sandy struck, so he has experienced coastal devastation first-hand. 'It was heartbreaking and sobering, but it was transformative,' he says. 'I was seeing entire neighbourhoods shut down, people having to leave their homes and sleep in the school gymnasium … the city was just wildly unprepared.' But they noticed that residential areas behind wetlands were less affected by Sandy. 'Those salt marshes created a natural buffer and a natural wave mitigation. They absorbed the energy, unlike the sea walls that were trying to fight against it.' Wetlands bring other benefits, Christo adds, including: 'increased carbon sequestration, better quality of life for area residents, more opportunities for biodiversity'. Have the Trump administration's cuts derailed Boston's well-laid plans? Less than feared, it turns out. For one thing, Boston's funding is coming from city and state budgets, rather than central government. The city has a dedicated $75m reserve for climate resilience projects, Osgood explains, 'which helps us leverage the second pool of funding, which is competitive state and federal grants'. There is also private-sector funding, coming from developers and industry. On the federal level, a key agency is the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), which carries out big civil works nationally, including flood protection. Trump's spending bill has cut $1.4bn from the USACE's non-defence spending, capriciously targeting blue states more than red ones. But accessing USACE funds is a drawn-out process, taking years and requiring congressional approval, and Boston had already secured some substantial grants in the past few years. Osgood believes they can make up the rest of the federal shortfall, such as the Fema cuts: 'This is a slice of the pie that we thought we had checked off, and now we've got to go back and find more money to fill that back in. But that said, from a fundamental standpoint, what we're seeing out of Washington is confusion around what is the federal government's role in climate resilience writ large. And if you take the administration at their word of wanting to redefine what Fema is about, that's a gamechanger.' Other coastal cities ought to be more concerned. Some are in danger of leaving it too late; some are going in the opposite direction. In Florida, one of the states most vulnerable to sea-level rises, governor Ron DeSantis introduced legislation last July that erased the words 'climate change' from the state's laws, even as Florida has experienced floods, record rainfall and a succession of hurricanes in the past 12 months – with more of the same expected this year. 'Here-and-now political expediency is outweighing the reality of the science and the reality on the ground,' says Swett. If some US politicians are refusing to learn, broader society is at least increasingly aware of the threat. 'The cat is out of the bag in Boston,' says Osgood, who says that educating and informing the public is an important part of the plan. 'There is not a developer worth their salt that can attract a tenant by ignoring coastal resilience. It just can't happen, regardless of government policy. Any major tenant who's going to be occupying a building in the downtown, or in the Seaport, who's being asked to sign a 10-year lease, is saying, 'All right: and how are you prepared for Boston's changing climate?' It is now a market-driven force.' If science and reality aren't enough to get the message through, maybe the economics can. Hurricane Sandy cost nearly $30bn in repairs in New York City. A 'once in a hundred years' flood in Boston would inundate more than 2,000 buildings and cause more than $2.3bn of damage, according to the city's estimates. Money spent up front 'has a massively high return on investment,' says Swett. 'So these are projects that should be eminently fundable. The question is, how do we get that done in time to provide the protection that people are counting on?' Rather than running away from the problem, Boston is running towards it, treating it with the urgency it demands. 'We have to finish these projects sooner rather than later to solve a problem that is coming at us very quickly,' says Swett. As everyone in Boston knows, the only real solution is to address the causes of climate change itself – global heating, increased CO2 levels, fossil fuel emissions. That is a conversation that still feels a long way off in the US, but like the sea itself, it is surely getting closer all the time. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
