SAWS says equipment failed ahead of Tuesday's storm
The South African Weather Services says some of its monitoring equipment weren't working during this week's severe weather in parts of the country.
At a media briefing in Gauteng, CEO Jerry Lengoasa said technology failed us.
"While the automatic weather stations, rain gauge networks, upper air sounding stations and lightning detection networks were fully functional during the storm. Sadly, of the five radar systems we required to be active - only one was fully functional. The second one had regular transmission faults," he says.
Parts of Gauteng, the North West, Mpumalanga experienced severe weather with KwaZulu-Natal being the worst hit.
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Lengoasa says lessons have been learnt.
"Whilst we did send our weather watch and severe weather warnings, these were directed at our primary first-level users. Some media partners and private sector clients - the key vast majority of ordinary citizens did not receive this critical life-saving information," he says.
See scenes from Tuesday's storm in KZN below.