A woman has died after being stuck overnight on a bus on a road paralysed by unusually heavy snowfall that began on Friday in eastern South Africa, authorities said on Sunday. Traffic remained blocked for around 30 kilometres (19 miles) including on the N3, one of the country’s main roads that links Johannesburg to the east coast city of Durban, the road concession company said in the morning.
A 39-year-old woman died of hypothermia in hospital on Saturday after spending Friday night stranded on the road with other passengers in a minibus taxi, Roland Robertson, a manager with emergency services company Midlands EMS, told AFP. The passengers were stranded near the town of Mooiplaas, about 430 kilometres (270 miles) from Johannesburg. “They were out in the cold all night, with no blankets, no anything. They were not prepared for this,” Robertson told ENCA broadcaster.
Passenger rescue operations continued in very difficult conditions on Sunday, particularly around the Van Reenen Pass in the Drakensberg Mountains, about 330 kilometres southeast of Johannesburg, the N3 concessionaire said.
Some cars were able to be escorted out of the area, but other abandoned and broken-down vehicles were making it difficult for graders to clear the snow and for rescuers to find people still stuck, the company’s operations manager Thania Dhoogra told ENCA, describing an “impenetrable” traffic jam of stopped vehicles “for about 30 kilometers.”
Authorities were unable to say Sunday how many people or vehicles were stranded on the roads. In some areas, snowfall reached up to two metres, the road safety organisation Arrive Alive on X reported on Saturday.
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