#TheHerald180 | When the skies fell on Port Elizabeth

“The cars were literally rolling down the river and blocking up the bridges [at the entrance to the harbour]. The bus company [building] was underwater,” recalls Valentine Brink who remembers witnessing the devastation wrought by the great flood in Port Elizabeth of 1968.

A towering funnel of cloud reaching a staggering height of more than 12,000m had unleashed a deadly deluge on the city on September 1 with the city being bombarded by thunderstorms so severe that residents could not remember seeing anything like it.

With the triple whammy of three storm fronts, the meteorological office had recorded the height of this astonishing pillar of cloud which — like a burst dam wall — released a torrential, unrelenting downpour: more than 40cm in a mere four hours.

The result was havoc — nine fatalities, including a father and his young daughter who drowned after becoming trapped beneath a parked car at the bottom of Russell Road — prominent buildings and a huge network of roads and bridges destroyed or disabled, and an entire river redirected.

“The PE Tramways bus company building was completely flooded.

“The [Baakens] river was huge, powerful,” Brink said.

Residents of Valley Road had to be rescued from their roofs as the raging floodwaters steadily rose.

The Baakens River washed away people, cars and caravans and hundreds of residents from the northern areas lost their shacks as the Chatty River washed away everything they owned.

And a raging Shark River lived up to its name by devouring everything in its path — including the then Boet Erasmus Stadium and one of the city’s most popular attractions, Happy Valley, which was wiped out by the non-stop wall of water which eventually slammed into the Humewood promenade, creating a waterfall.

“Sixteen inches [41cm] of rain fell on Port Elizabeth in a single day — the highest rainfall figure in living memory,” The Herald reported at the time.

An odd sight was the number of Volkswagen Beetles which could be seen still driving through the thundershowers and rising waters — thanks to the positioning of their exhaust pipes which allowed for increased clearance.

The cost of the disaster? More than R400m.

A young hockey player in September 1968, Kevin Brown was just 21 years old. In 2018, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the floods, Brown said in an interview that to get sucked into a floodwater-engorged drainpipe so that even police gave up any chance of his survival — and come out the other side with not a bone broken — had been unbelievable.

A player for Pirates and about to start his new job as a sales trainee at Firestone the next day, Brown said: “I don’t think we realised how much it had rained through the night.”

He recalled that he and his pals, David Murphy and Roger Ash, had been driving in Hallack Road near St George’s Park at about 9am.

“As we got to the dip at the back of the Sharley Cribb Nurses’ Home it was completely flooded so we stopped. But we saw a couple of other cars get through all right so we went ahead.”

What the three couldn’t know was that a huge well of water had built up behind the nurses’ home’s boundary wall and the next thing — bang! It burst.

“We just heard this thud as the wall came crashing down and a 2m wall of water hit us.

“Dave and Roger were in front and managed to get out the driver’s side.

“I was at the back and got out the other side — but as I got out I went over the edge and the next thing I was sucked down the drainpipe feet-first.”

Brown could not remember much about hurtling about 50m down the one-metre-wide duct underneath Target Kloof.

“But I shot out the other end like a cork out a bottle and was washed straight up against a tree, hitting the left side of my ribs hard.

“I was full of cuts and bruises, but not a bone was broken.

“If I had hit my head in that pipe, I would have been dead.”

A panicked Murphy and Ash were left wondering what had happened to their friend and were desperately searching for him, suspecting he might have been sucked into the stormwater drain.

Murphy managed to get to a phone to call the police, who arrived in Hallack Road.

“When Dave and Roger told the cops they thought I had gone down the pipe, they even said something like ‘well, you won’t see him again’.”

After a still stunned and dazed Brown — all his clothes ripped off apart from his jeans — started hearing pine trees crack and beginning to fall in the heavy rain, he quickly scrambled to his feet.

“I didn’t know where the hell I was.

“But then a guy in a Land Rover picked me up in Target Kloof and took me to casualty at Provincial [Hospital], where I had to wait a couple of hours because the doctor couldn’t get there due to all the flooding.

“I was given morphine — and that felt pretty good.”

By the time the Bay area experienced what is considered its other great flood in 1981, I was a newly employed reporter for The Herald and got to witness first-hand the devastation that repeated itself a mere 13 years later.

It was almost astonishingly identical in terms of how much rain fell, though less intense — nearly 43cm in 24 hours on March 26 — with a number of deaths and again, huge structural damage to roads, bridges and homes.

Isolated by the floodwaters, the city was hit by gale-force winds which prevented SA Air Force helicopters from taking off on a rescue mission to help stranded residents until the next day.

I had been sent to Despatch and found myself wading among streets of deserted houses in waist-deep, chocolate-coloured water as photographer Jon Inggs drove on to capture images.

The next thing: Plop! I was underwater and up to my neck in it. A manhole cover had been lifted by the floodwater and I dropped like a stone.

The result was a hairline fracture to my shin bone, but I managed to limp and find refuge on one home’s elevated veranda where I began writing my story — with a certain degree of agony.

The entire basement of Newspaper House was also flooded out and The Herald had to be printed at the then Oosterlig for six months.

The Herald