Flooding turned Ermelo’s streets into raging rivers after heavy rainfall in Ermelo recently.

The Highvelder published an article, ‘Swamped’ in its 5 February edition. The first heavy rainfall on 31 January, caused a disaster for residents of Ermelo and surrounding towns.

Several areas in town flooded and municipal drainage systems were very quickly overwhelmed.

A resident in Sluiter Street who wished to remain anonymous, said this was the first time their house flooded.

“All that went through my mind was,how much damage there will be when the storm passes,” she said.

Her children were traumatised.

“We do not have the means to replace the items and also don’t have insurance.” she said.

According to her municipal employees removed a tree trunk from the storm water drain.

She would like to thank Messrs. Chris Raath, Tom Boyder and his wife that arranged for us to sleep at West Street Inn for the night, and West Street Inn for there friendly service.

Rain showers continued through the week which saw an increase in the water levels of the Vaal River and local dams.

According to information from Storm Report SA, the water levels in the Vaal Dam increased from 75.4% on 30 January to 85.1% full on 4 February.

According to Mr Lion du Plessis, chairman of the Ermelo East Farmers Association and local farmer, rain is always needed.

He said, in our area East of Ermelo we had a very good early season but this amount of recent rain was way too much.

“It is better to get this amount of rain later in the season because crops are older and can handle heavy rainfall, but we had more than 400mm of rain in 10 days and the crops are now at a stand still, not producing as we hoped,” he said.

Mr Du Plessis said continuous rain is usually good, but farmers need sun to dry the soil and give maize time to pollinate.

“The amount of rainfall we received in the East of Ermelo in a very short period of time is really out of the ordinary,” he said.

Read the complete article in the Highvelder newspaper.