•  windhoek
• Wednesday, February 09, 2011
• Inter Press Service

A decade after heavy floods wrecked havoc in Southern Africa, the region is better prepared to monitor and respond to seasonal flooding. This is thanks as much to the growing strength of transboundary institutions as it is to technical improvements.

Water levels during this year’s flood season in Southern Africa will likely top the disastrous floods of 2000. In that year the Mozambican capital Maputo flooded while the banks of the Limpopo burst and some 45,000 people had to be rescued. The floods were compounded by water-borne diseases and a tropical cyclone. Authorities across the region were criticised for failing to anticipate which areas would be worst affected as well as for a slow and inadequate response to the crisis, which cost 800 lives.

One response to the 2000 disasters was to strengthen the warning systems along the region's numerous river basins. A state-of-the-art early warning system was devised for the region. The Southern African Development Community Hydrological Cycle Observing System (SADC-HYCOS) was intended to have 128 weather stations which transmit accurate and regular data to a satellite. A German research institute was to decode the data and post it on a website — the information was to be mirrored on a site maintained by the South African Department of Water Affairs.

'The idea of HYCOS was that all stations transmit in real-time to the same database that could be used to predict floods,' says Guido van Langenhove, Namibia’s chief hydrologist. But while some countries like Namibia and South Africa have set up parts of such a system themselves, HYCOS seems to have become a white — wet — elephant.

According to the South African Department of Water Affairs (DWAF) 108 of the planned 128 stations — each costing $10,000 - were installed. But only one in five is presently transmitting reliable readings. 'There are no operational stations north of Namibia,' says van Langenhove; yet according to DWAF, Angola and Zambia should between them have 17 automated monitoring stations.

'It was a waste of money,' van Langenhove asserts. 'A lot of electronic equipment was dumped, but there was no capacity-building or training of technicians. The stations worked sometimes for a week, sometimes for a year. When they broke down there was no one to repair them. Or they started malfunctioning and give the wrong readings. Namibia had nine stations but none of them worked; we had to fix them ourselves.'

He estimates the project cost $4 million. The project's donor, the Government of the Netherlands, pulled out. The SADC-HYCOS office in Pretoria was dismantled and the project is currently on hold.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service