Road Trip: Laingsburg

Laingsburg is more than just a small country town to hurry through on your way to somewhere else. It is the smallest municipality in South Africa. Most people of my generation will immediately think of floods when they think of Laingsburg. On 25 January, 1981, when our oldest child was only a baby, a flood wiped out three quarters of the town.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYWg5v3pL-s&t=174s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al9SbdhhQG0

We took a bike ride this morning to look at the Flood Museum.

WHAT HAPPENED?

Professor Dereck, of the Civil Engineering Department of UCT, calculated that 8,000 tons of water a second flowed through the town at the height of the flood.

Rain since the Friday had saturated the catchment area and both the Wilgehout and the Baviaans rivers had come down in flood, bringing debris which blocked the narrow area of the bridge. When the Buffels river also flooded as a result of another cloudburst, there was nowhere for the water to go and it flooded back into the town, virtually making it a dam. 104 people died and 72 bodies have never been found.

The story that affected me the most was about a local family, the Koens.  Pieter, the Postmaster, and Lina had five children. The four oldest girls worked in Cape Town. Marinda was going to be married in less than a month and her sister, Liana was due to be married in June.

The flood swept away Pieter, Lina, their youngest daughter, Jeanette and their adopted son of 10 months. Only the baby’s body was ever found.

“Now my father won’t be able to give away the bride when my sisters get married,” said Lisinda. “Instead we will all have to buy mourning dresses.”

There were other exhibits in the museum. I was fascinated by the old switchboard,

 and saddened by the soggy school suitcase.

After visiting the museum we went to a quaint coffee shop where we ate triangular cheesecake.

On the way back we passed the NG church which survived the flood.

The top of the signboard shows the level of the flood.

The pastor at the time was Dominee Malan Jacobs, a well-loved man who lost his life while aiding the elderly in the old age home. The sermon he preached that morning was remarkably preserved in his notebook in his flooded study. In it he speaks of death and ends with the verse, “I am the resurrection and the life…I give you life eternal.”