Inside the Eastern Cape’s biggest rescues — emergency services chief records a decade of disasters

A Decade of Disasters, written by John S Best and Marie Best. (Photo: Deon Ferreira)

5 May 2025

For many years, friends and family of John Best, well-known police officer, former chairman of the Eastern Cape Emergency Coordinating Committee and now city councillor in the Nelson Mandela Bay metro, urged him to write about his impressive career heading rescue operations in the province. Now he and his wife, Marie, who was at his side through it all, have finally done so in a book set to be released on 13 May.

“The thing very few people know about me is that I am a big royalist,” John Best says as he gets ready to tell the story of how he headed some of the Eastern Cape’s biggest rescues between 1993 and 2003.

“Marie gets very irritated with me because I love watching the stories about the royal family and the queen on television. But let me tell you the best part: In 1995, I was in England on a tour with the Springbok shooting team. We visited Windsor Castle and the guards showed us the dining room table where the queen would eat every day. I sat there at that table and I got to hold her knife and fork. But of course, no pictures were allowed. But it was a big moment for me,” he said.

Now, he is facing the limelight in a whole new way as his book, detailing the brave rescues he headed, is about to be published.

“I am nervous about this book business,” he laughs.

“Every now and then, Marie must give me a kalmeer pilletjie (a tranquilliser),” he chuckles.

Best, who is also a South African shooting champion, was born and bred in Gqeberha. After matriculating at Pearson High School, he joined the police in 1975.

shooting medals John Best with medals he has won in shooting competitions. (Photo: Deon Ferreira)

In 1980, he met Marie, who was also in the police force, while they were both on duty at the magistrates’ courts in Gqeberha, then known as Port Elizabeth.

After many promotions and transfers, including an order by the national police commissioner to establish an upgraded radio control centre in Pretoria, he returned home to Gqeberha in 1993 and between 1995 - 1996 he was tasked with upgrading the radio control centre locally.

“When I look back, it makes me sad that so much of what I did has been destroyed,” he said.

“At that centre, an alarm went off if a phone was not answered in three rings.”

Through Best’s intervention, operators could also see if the caller was ringing from a landline, in whose name the phone was registered and where the person’s house or business was.

best promotion John Best is hoisted 450m aloft in a police helicopter to celebrate a promotion. (Picture: Supplied)

“I would get a report every morning on who dropped their calls and who didn’t answer fast enough,” Best said.

Last year, the South African Police Service admitted that the Nelson Mandela Bay 10111 call centre had dropped close to 60,000 calls in the 2023/2024 financial year.

In 1993, Best was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and became the chairperson of the Eastern Cape Emergency Services.

“This is where the book starts,” Best said.

“In 1995, when the Police received the first cellphones, I and the police pilot Theo Meyer were the first to get those big Motorola MP500 phones. I had to carry all the spare batteries with me.”

Marie then became John’s secretary at Emergency Services.

“She is meticulous and she kept perfect records,” Best said, “but when we started writing the book, we discovered that all her minutes were destroyed,” he said.

So the two relied on their memories, interviewed others who were involved, and, with some disagreement and lots of research, managed to document the biggest rescues they were involved in. For eight of the years described in the book, Best was in charge of the provincial emergency rescue services and for another two, he acted as an adviser.

“We had many disagreements,” he laughed.

“But I will put it like this. If we had to get to the tree, we walked to it from different sides,” he said.

“We started writing two years ago, here at this dining room table. We interviewed some of the roleplayers to make sure we remembered right.

We could have added many more incidents, but we didn’t have the dates,” he said.

“I know of four or five chokka boats that landed in trouble at St Francis Bay, and we saved the crews with the helicopter. But we couldn’t find much information on these,” he said.

storms river mouth rescue The BK 117 helicopter with John Best and his rescue squad prepares to land at Storms River Mouth after 25 people were caught in flash floods while tubing down the river in March 2000, resulting in 13 deaths. (Photo: Deon Ferreira)

storys river mouth Cape Town Mountain Club members arrive at Storms River Mouth in March 2000 to assist John Best and his squad with the rescue and recovery of 25 people caught in flash flooding. (Photo: Deon Ferreira)

Among the incidents featured in the book is the rescue of people who were washed into the sea by a flash flood on the Storms River at Tsitsikamma in 2000.

On 20 March 2000, 13 people died when taking tubes down the Storms River as part of an adventure expedition – 25 people were on the trip and 13, including the expedition leader, died.

The participants were all from the Gqeberha law firm, Stulting, Cilliers and De Jager. The 25th anniversary of the tragedy was commemorated this year at St Bernadette’s Church in Walmer.

“I don’t want to give away too much,” Best said.

“But we always knew that Storms River was going to be a problem someday. We had planned for it.”

He said the tragic events of that two-day rescue would always remain with him.

“I also did a lot of research on plane accidents and assisted the airport here with their emergency plan. SAA asked me to teach in Johannesburg and Cape Town on how to handle an emergency. I believe in practice, practice, practice.

“In the book, we tell the story of a plane accident and two stories of helicopter accidents.”

Best also recounts how he and Marie had to coordinate the first rescue in South Africa using cellphone triangulation. At the time, three people went missing on the Kraai River and by isolating the towers from where the last phone call emanated, John and Marie, with the help of Vodacom, managed to isolate an area for search and rescue officials to look for the three.

john marie best cellphone triangulation John and Marie Best demonstrate how they performed their first cellphone tower triangulation to find three people who went missing in the Kraai River. (Photo: Deon Ferreira)

“You see this dining room table where we wrote the book? It was at the same table that we sat with the maps and the rules to plan this rescue,” he said.

Best also said he had introduced the “red-jacket official” at a rescue scene. “Journalists and someone arriving at a scene knew the guy with the red jacket was the one in charge.”

He said collaboration between the SAPS, ambulance service, the National Sea Rescue Institute, the fire brigades, the Mountain Club, the air force and Lifesaving South Africa was what made the rescues he planned worth it.

“Everybody was a specialist, but the specialists all worked together,” he said.

zingara The wreck of the Zingara, where John Best and his squad were called out to rescue crew members at Sardinia Bay in 1995. (Photo: Mark West)

Best said he had been overwhelmed by the reaction to his book. All 100 people he has invited to his launch on 13 May will be there.

“Des Heuer, the former head of the ambulance service (in what is now known as Nelson Mandela Bay), is coming from Cape Town. I am sad that John Fobian, from the Police’s Disaster Management Centre, won’t be there. He died during the Covid-19 pandemic,” Best said.

Best said the book was not too long. “You can read it in a few hours, but our proofreaders told us they just couldn’t put it down,” he said.

He said that after publishers turned down his manuscript, he was taking part in a Run/Walk for Life event one day when he began chatting with another participant.

“It turned out that she helped people publish their books,” he said.

Now the Bests are fielding orders from as far away as New Zealand and England.

But despite the promise of success, Marie remains level-headed.

“At the time, it was just a job for me. John and I had an agreement – we didn’t ask each other about our jobs. When he went out on a rescue, I always treated no news as good news. I am not someone who sits around and becomes anxious,” she said.

She wrote the first pages of the book by hand.

A Decade of Disasters, written by John and Marie Best. (Photo: Deon Ferreira)

“When I made a mistake, I started from the beginning and did that page or chapter again until it was right,” she said.

Best, who is now a DA city councillor, said he still answers the phone within the first few rings.

“It makes me very angry if someone in a leadership position doesn’t answer their phone or return calls,” he said. “I don’t think I will ever stop doing it, it is who I am.”

Best also served for four years as the mayoral committee member for Safety and Security under the two DA mayors for Nelson Mandela Bay, Athol Trollip and Nqaba Bhanga.

“I can say that I have three legacies from this time. I convinced Fikile Mbalula, who was the Minister of Transport, to implement an online booking system for driver’s licences. Also, I provided political oversight in the upgrading and establishment of two driver’s licence centres in Nelson Mandela Bay – in Korsten and Motherwell.

“I also established the metro police, even though the political idea was from the ANC, and I introduced ShotSpotter in Helenvale (a notorious area in Nelson Mandela Bay for gang-related crime)”.

ShotSpotter uses triangulation technology to guide police officers to a shooting scene with accuracy and speed.

“I think the project that still makes me the proudest is the online booking system for driver’s licences,” Best said. DM

A Decade of Disasters by John Best can be ordered from the author at [email protected]

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