A night of anguish: 30 cm of rain in twelve hours

1918 · regional · Beaufort West

The dam wall held this time, but 30,48 cm fell in twelve hours. The tennis court and a large number of dwellings in the low-lying Coloured township were destroyed, a long section of the water main from the Kloof waterworks was washed away, and a four-year-old child drowned. These are BEAUFORT WEST's records, about 91 km from the centre of the ground this project maps, and the article makes no statement about Klaarstroom or the Koup farms. What makes them worth having is that they are the same rainfall regime and the nearest place where somebody wrote the weather down year by year. Read as regional context, not as a record of what fell on these farms. [SRC-262]

Sources

• Wessel Visser, "Between drought and deluge: A history of water provision to Beaufort West, ca. 1858-1955", pp. 1-21 pp. 1-21; supplied as the PDF 31-61-1-SM.pdf