A grandmother's desperate plea for help

IT looked like a bobbing rubbish bag, dragged along the raging flood water in the street, with the torrential rain pelting down Cape Town streets.

- TRACY-LYNN RUITERS

But what was inside would change lives forever and unleashed the heroes of a poverty-stricken community.

Parkwood grandmother Francis Fick, saw a video of a woman carring a child in a black rubbish bag that she moments earlier rescued from a flooded street and thought that the child must be dead. Then as she was wondering, the woman carried the child to her front door, it was her grandchild Tyler, whom she was waiting for to return from school.

Fick, 60, said the incident - which unfolded in Moosa Walk - could have been prevented if the stormwater system had been cleared in time. The drains, she explained, routinely overflow during winter, turning the roads into what she described as "a river".

"He is traumatised, even though he doesn't understand it, but I can see it, because he doesn't want to go outside alone anymore. He wants me with him," said Fick.

According to her, on the day of the incident, she was at home waiting for her grandson, Tyler Cupido, to return from school. Tyler, who is eight years old and in Grade 1, normally walks home with his older cousin, but that day he decided to leave alone.