It is now October 2022 and the mouth of the St. Lucia estuary is currently open. but ... there are now even bigger problems, coz the silt that came along for the ride, during the April / May 2022 floods, and stayed behind in problem zones, is preventing the flood waters from returning to the ocean.
I am not an artist, and can't find somebody to draw a few pics to explain the issue, so let us test my storytelling skills.. and find out if I can tell the rather nasty story around the silt issue in just words...with no images...
Well, the story is all about the SILT and debris that come along with flood waters.
So when water is flowing fast it can pick up stuff and carry that stuff along for the ride. what stuff are we talking about here? Well, any small loose stuff like topsoil, leaves, dead grass, plastic bags, and any wind-blown items. this all ends up in the river.
So not all this stuff ends up at the bottom end of the water flow pattern, which is the ocean. Sea water evaporates, it rains, the rainwater flows back into the sea then the cycle continues. but the debris and stuff carried to the lower end of the water flow cycle is the issue. this stuff can not be evaporated by the sun, so it just accumulates and accumulates more. Now the 2017 GEF-funded project which connected the Umfolozi River System to the Northern sections of Lake St. Lucia needs to be very carefully added to the narrative here, coz this nasty crime against the environment was supported with great vigour and pleasure by the IWPA, which had alternative agendas that the iSimangaliso Wetland Park Authority needed to address.
Removing the natural renewable resources from the local environment would suit these guys (IWPA) very nicely, coz that would bankrupt the local folks, and thus prevent them from acquiring legal assistance during their expulsions from the area, why? coz t is a world heritage site, so the locals must pack up their bags and leave. The locals however showed the IWPA a very big toffee, and basically stayed put, and are now indigent and living in a space that should be abounding with nature, but is a rather nasty-looking space where drought has taken its toll, and the environment is in a very bad way.
The fact that the elites operating high-end International tourism businesses from the town / village of St Lucia, see these local folks as "POACHERS" and undesirable is due to the extremely successful public perception management strategies applied by one ANDREW ZALOUMIS as CEO of the IWPA, following instructions from the national tourism bodies... Remember the Transfrontier park Any way let's focus on the mud stuff.
If water is carrying stuff (SILT) along coz it has some speed, where will this stuff all end up?
Well, that answer is simple... wherever the water slows down... the slower it gets the more stuff drops out. Now the issue suddenly becomes where does the water slow down enough to cause dropouts to start happening?
Now the area from the N2 (National Road) to the ocean is rather far, about 25 KM, and with some twists and turns in the Umfolozi River pathway, that ends up at around 30 Km. Within this space, the Umfolozi river floods its banks and starts filling up the Monzi flood plains, the Umfolozi flats, the Sokhulu swamps and Mapelane bogs, but still flows rather strong in the true flow zone.
the water flowing in the true flow zone of the Umfolozi River soes not actually slow down, and rushes along carrying its silt load all the way, back inalnd through the St. Lucia narrows, coz of the 2017 GEF Project.
This means that the water in the true flow zone is still carrying gross volumes of silt. During the last few years in the post-2017 GEF project years, this has repeated many times over, with enormous volumes of silt being deposited at the Northern edges of the narrows, where the St. Lucia Narrows join the ST. Lucia lake system, at the lake's most southern tip.
So the Northern end of the narrows (Fast flowing water) meets the Southern edge of the lake,(Standing water) and then stops flowing instantly. This causes the most horrid scenario where the silt just builds a big wall of heavy silt dropouts.
During flood times the water arrives at this build point shown in the Google Map Below, and this is serious. coz why? coz the silt carrying water continues to arrive .. and continues for days, last time in the April / May 2022 floods the water carried on coming for more than 6 weeks... think about that for six weeks !!!!!!
60 seconds in a minute... then
60 minutes in an hour... then
24 hours a day...
then 7 days a week ...
for six weeks? 6 whole weeks..?
All this water was carrying silt, and the silt all dropped out where the water slowed down... the wall that is still there now is a true nasty problem, and we as human beings need to do something, coz we as human beings caused that silt to rnd up in that space. If nature was left to take its own course, this would never have happened. The mouth would have opened, and the silt would have been deposited in the ocean. The ocean is a high-energy zone, and the silt would have been distributed over a very large area, causing minimal negative impacts. The opposite is now true, where the silt has accumulated in a very small area, and now acts as a dam wall keeping the Umfolozi Flood waters within the Lake St. Lucia system.
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