Rescuers still pulling bodies out of the water as death toll in South Africa floods reaches 86

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) - The death toll in floods in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province has risen to 86, the police minister said Saturday as rescuers continued to retrieve bodies from the floodwater.

Senzo Mchunu, the country’s top law enforcement official, spoke to police rescue teams that have been searching for missing people and recovering bodies in and around the town of Mthatha since the floods hit in the predawn hours of Tuesday.

Mchunu said the floods were a tragedy but urged local residents to ignore what he called inaccurate reports spreading on social media that the disaster was caused by someone opening the sluice gates at a nearby dam, leading to water surging through communities. Mchunu said the Mthatha Dam in question did not have sluice gates.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said on Friday during a visit to Mthatha that authorities would investigate if there were any problems with the local dam that might have led to the tragedy.

A wall of water 3-4 meters (10-13 feet) high in places flowed out of the river, the head of the provincial government said, washing away victims with parts of their houses and trapping others inside their homes.

Ramaphosa partly attributed the rains and floods to climate change and said some of South Africa’s coastal regions were now constantly vulnerable to weather-related disasters. More than 400 people died in flooding in and around South Africa’s east coast city of Durban in 2022, which a study linked to climate change.

The floods in the Mthatha area and a neighboring district caught many people unaware despite weather services issuing warnings last week that an extreme cold front was heading for the region, bringing heavy rains and gale-force winds.

The largely rural region is one of the country’s poorest and authorities said communities living in informal housing close to the river were especially vulnerable when it burst its banks. Authorities have been criticized for the rescue response but also for the state of the infrastructure in the area.

Officials believe that people are still missing and the death toll could rise further as rescue teams have been searching through floodwater and damaged homes for nearly a week. One of the bodies retrieved on Saturday was that of a boy that rescuers believed was around 13 or 14 years old.

Many children are among the dead, although authorities haven’t given an exact count. Some of the victims were washed up to 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) away from their homes by the floods.