It is already spring in 2023, and the St. Lucia Estuary has been open to the ocean since 14 April 2022. The heavy rains is March / April 2022 changed many things here in the Greater St. Lucia wetlands park region. Many pans filled up, and overflowed into the river systems that feed lake St. Lucia .
the Umfolozi rivers both came down in serious floods, bringing tremendous silt toads and dropping thousands of millions of tonnes silt in places where it is now causing problems. The farmers on the Umfolozi flats them selves have been complaining about this for a number of years, basically since late 2002. Remember that the IWPA or iSimangaliso Wetland Park Authority closed the St. Lucia Estuary Mouth on instructions from the minister of Environmental Affairs following the Jolly Rubino shipping incident. The Jolly Rubino had some nasty chemicals on board, which the authorities were worried about. The water flow issues would have allowed these nasty chemicals to enter the St. Lucia estuary systems, so to prevent this they mechanically closed the St. Lucia Estuary mouth, and then kept this mouth closed until it was mechanically breached in Jan 2021.
the mouth stayed open until early June 2021 when it closed naturally. the only other time the mouth was open was for a very sjhort period in 2007, when the mouth breached from the ocaen side following a cyclone out to sea. this cyclone GUMEDE did not bring any rain to us, but did bring rather large surf.
WE do need to put things into context a little bit. The St. Lucia estuary system is a rather complex one where 5 different rivers feed the marine esturine systems and semi tidal lake systems. the biggest is the Umfolozi, which the IWPA claims to be 60 % of the total fresh water inflow . see the video below.
The Daily Maverick published a very misleading article found here where they say that the
breached naturally with the last floods in March April 2022.
