The Vergelegen Mediclinic was closed after being flooded during a heavy downpour. But who is to blame?
|||Cape Town - Could the devastating flood in a private Cape Town hospital have been prevented if steps had been taken since the hospital last flooded in August?
This debate is now raging in Somerset West and neighbouring towns after the flood on Friday night saw patients of Vergelegen Mediclinic evacuated and the hospital itself closed. It will be weeks, if not months, before it re-opens.
Sources say the effects will be felt severely in the area.
Central to the allegations are that the City of Cape Town, and possibly hospital authorities, failed to heed the warning when the hospital partially flooded on August 28. They are accused of failing to effectively manage the wide floodplain in the valley upstream of the hospital.
The hospital lies just 500m from the Lourens River, and in winter the water table is high. The hospital is also directly in the path of a purpose-built stormwater overflow gulley, designed to carry floodwater if the Lourens River breaks its banks.
Further upstream, the river’s banks have not been sufficiently built up to prevent floodwaters from spilling into farmlands, from where the waters race into a residential suburb, Bizweni, and then into the hospital.
Also upstream, an irrigation canal runs east off the river, and the river bank has not been built up sufficiently to ensure the flow into this canal is contained and regulated.
Since its construction in 1988, the hospital’s location was always a potentially dangerous one, affected parties told the Cape Argus. They asked not to be named to protect their various positions in the community.
The hospital group’s spokesman, Biren Valodia, said it had made “every effort from our side to investigate and address the causes of the flooding” in August. The hospital appointed consulting engineers “to provide proposals and recommendations towards averting or mitigating the effects of possible future stormwater flooding during heavy rains”. These had included possible on-site and off-site retention dams.
But Valodia added that “the magnitude of the latest flood far exceeded the design parameters of the previous recommendation that was based on thorough investigations and findings, and we are currently considering a new proposal”.
Brett Herron, mayoral committee member for stormwater, responded: “Unfortunately, it was an extraordinary event... when rainfall in excess of 120mm was measured over a three-hour period in the mountainous areas draining to the Lourens River.”
The city estimated the storm to be worse than a one-in-50-year flood, while the the storm of August 28 had been a one-in-10-year flood.
“Such intense rainfall ordinarily results in rivers overflowing, bursting their banks and flowing across their natural floodplains,” Herron said.
The city argued that erecting berms at various sites to channel any floodwaters more effectively “could serve to compromise other parties by redirecting water flow and raising flood levels elsewhere”.
The city was implementing a “flood management scheme” for the river.
But many locals disagreed, arguing the hospital was important enough to protect specifically. And now that it was already trashed, any flood plan was too late.
Cape Argus