The death toll from flooding in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province has risen to 101, officials said on 2025-06-26, as search teams continued looking for two missing children.
AP reported that the floods were triggered by heavy rain on June 9 and 10, when a cold front swept through the region and sent water through homes, roads and other infrastructure. The damage was concentrated in rural parts of the Eastern Cape, one of the poorest provinces in the country. Authorities said 94 of the 101 victims had been identified and their bodies returned to families. The youngest fatality was a 12-month-old baby, and 38 of the dead were children.
The weather system brought more than just rising water. AP said it damaged roads, cut electricity supplies and forced thousands of people from their homes. More than 4,000 residents were left homeless across the province. The provincial official who gave the update said the search for the two missing children was still active, showing that even after the main floodwaters receded the disaster remained unresolved for some families.
The floods have also created a major reconstruction burden. South Africa declared a state of national disaster last week, allowing the government to release relief funding. Eastern Cape officials estimated that about $288 million would be needed to replace damaged infrastructure. That number points to a second phase of the crisis: the cost of rebuilding roads, services and housing in a province already struggling with poverty and limited resilience.
President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the worst-hit sites and linked the flooding to climate change, according to AP. The report also noted that another cold front later hit South Africa’s Western Cape, bringing more rain and flooding around Cape Town. That broader weather pattern shows that the eastern disaster did not happen in isolation; it came amid a continuing run of extreme weather events affecting parts of the country.
South Africa is especially vulnerable to severe weather fronts moving in from the Indian and Southern Oceans. AP recalled that more than 400 people died in 2022 flooding around Durban and nearby areas. The comparison is a reminder that the Eastern Cape disaster is part of a recurring national risk rather than an unprecedented one-off event.
What is new in the latest update is the scale of the confirmed loss. The toll has crossed 100 and the count still may change as searches continue. For now, the official picture is that an intense cold-front storm system, concentrated in a rural and under-resourced part of the country, killed more than a hundred people, displaced thousands more and left a province facing months of recovery work.
