Is it really Saturday night...and Easter weekend too?
What an absolutely crazy week this has been; I would never in my wildest dreams have thought the rain that started last weekend, would end up so catastrophic and become what is now known as Cyclone ISSA!
Our lives have only revolved around the damage caused by that cyclone, and we've heard more and more sad stories of people being buried alive under the mud; absolutely horrific!
The residents at the end of our road are still cut off as the section where the mudslide came down caused a collapse in our dead-end road.
Miracles do happen, the roads department came out to grade the road and remove the soil; it was quite unbelievable just how much soil came down just looking at the road, never mind how much bulldozed the home below the road!
The workers are overwhelmed by what they've seen; their supervisor told me how they found a young child buried under the mud, but also told a story of how he heard of how a mother and baby were saved by a bed falling over them, actually protecting them from the mud!
They will be back tomorrow to hopefully complete and open the one lane so cars can pass through.
The number of services that's been affected is enormous; roads, stormwater, electricity, water & sanitation, internet fibre network, and many more.
The damage caused on the roads and bridges has made a huge impact on many services, so a number of essentials are hard to come by; things like deliveries of fuel, food, and medicine, as routing is taking much longer!
We have an abundance of water all around, but many areas' taps have run dry as the intense rain caused the bursting of many old water pipes. We have offered water from our Jojo tanks to friends as it can at least be used for bucket baths, flushing the loo, doing the washing, etc, but some live too far, and with limited fuel, this is not an option.
You can imagine that people's tolerance levels are not good at all as I've experienced on our neighbourhood group chat. Voicing an opinion that some mudslides could have been prevented if the correct engineering standards were used, caused an uproar! But, many people will still continue doing their own thing by building retaining walls without a good foundation, subsoil drainage, and steel reinforcing; then they wonder why it collapses in heavy rain!
I'll keep my mouth shut in the future as some people do not want to admit that they took shortcuts!
Mix water and soil together and you have a powerful force! Enough to cause massive destruction as we saw this past week!
The image on the right of the origin of the landslide was taken the day after, and the other one was after the soil had dried out a bit.
The biggest miracle happened today though; when I told you of Finding Hidden Treasures yesterday, you'll know that the search among the debris was started to find a set of car keys which also had the gear lock key on it. To replace that, the locksmith said the only way was to cut the gear lock off and buy a new one, which would have been very costly!
Hubby was so excited, it was like finding gold, and he could not wait to wash it and see if it still works, but as it's not an electronic key, it of course worked!
Car keys, aircon remote...but no aircon, and cellphone charger.
Is it time for us Silvers to move to that little house by the sea, as these kind of disasters are taking their toll?
This is day 16...yay, past the halfway mark...of my attempt at #Hiveblopomo, an initiative of the awesome bizzy Queen Bee @traciyork, encouraging all Hivers to write a blog a day for the month of April.
It's been a bit of a struggle the past few days, but so far, so good, hope I reach Day 30!
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