The tragedy is “one of the darkest moments in the history” of the province of KwaZulu-Natal, the regional government said in a tweet.
“We mourn together with the families for the people we lost to the heavy rains,” the government wrote. “We would like to commend the disaster response teams for the tireless work they have done to evacuate the affected communities.”
The floods hit KwaZulu-Natal, which includes the coastal city of Durban. Roads collapsed, giving way to deep cracks, and a huge stack of shipping containers plunged into muddy water, news outlet images showed.
A bridge near Durban was swept away leaving people stranded on both sides.
KwaZulu-Natal has experienced extreme rainfall since Monday in what the provincial government described as “one of the worst weather storms in our country’s history” in a statement posted to Facebook.
“The heavy rains that have hit our country in recent days have wreaked untold devastation, causing massive damage to life and infrastructure,” it said.
The provincial government later said it was continuing to work with the national government to ensure support was provided to all those affected.
The teams were working to evacuate people in areas that had experienced “mudslides, flooding and structural collapse of buildings and roads,” Sipho Hlomuka, a member of the KwaZulu-Natal Executive Council for Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, said on Tuesday Twitter.
“The heavy rains have impacted power lines in many communities, with technical teams working around the clock to restore power,” Hlomuka added.
Flooded power plants were inaccessible in the hard-hit community of eThekwini, Mayor Mxolisi Kaunda told reporters, while water mains were also damaged.
The local government has asked private and religious institutions to help with emergency relief efforts and asked for help from the South African National Defense Force to provide air support, he said.
The extreme weather comes just months after heavy rains and flooding hit other parts of southern Africa, with three tropical cyclones and two tropical storms in just six weeks from late January. There were 230 reported deaths and 1 million affected.
Scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) project – which analyzes how much the climate crisis might have contributed to an extreme weather event – found that climate change has made those events more likely.
“Once again we are seeing how the people least responsible for climate change are bearing the brunt of the impacts,” said Friederike Otto of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London on Tuesday, referring to the earlier storms in the south Africa.
“Rich countries should live up to their commitments and match loss and damage payments with much-needed funds for adaptation and for compensating victims of extreme events caused by climate change,” she added.
This is expected to be a major sticking point at the next international climate negotiations, the COP27 conference in November in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.
Scientists have warned that to stave off some irreversible effects of climate change, the world must try to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures some 200 years ago. The earth is already around 1.2 degrees warmer.
In south-east Africa, a warming of 2 degrees is projected to increase the frequency and intensity of torrential rain and flooding, as well as an increase in the intensity of powerful tropical cyclones associated with heavier rainfall.
CNN’s Amy Cassidy and Jorge Engels contributed to this story.