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W Cape mops up
19/08/2003 11:00 - (SA)
Cape Town - Cape Town began mopping up on Tuesday in the wake of a storm that brought snow, gale force winds and driving rain, and sent temperatures plunging.
Snow fell on Table Mountain on Monday night - and was still falling on Tuesday morning.
In Table Bay, salvors were preparing to go to the aid of a container ship driven on shore when she dragged her anchors.
The city's head of disaster management, Geoff Laskey, said hundreds of residents of informal settlements were given emergency accommodation overnight after their homes were flooded.
The main area of concern had been Wallacedene in the north of the city, where 400 people were affected.
The council had provided 600 meals, and about 180 people slept in a community hall and other community buildings on Monday night.
About 70 people were accommodated overnight in a creche after flooding at the Mpinga Square settlement in Nyanga, and disaster relief had also given meals to residents of flooded settlements in the Hyde Park area of Mitchell's Plain and Pella near Atlantis.
There had been widespread reports of blocked drains, water on roads and wind damage to roofs.
The container ship Sea Land Express ran aground at Sunset Beach near Milnerton on Tuesday morning after dragging her anchor.
Cape Town harbour master Captain Eddie Bremner said a salvage tug was putting up a tow line in a bid to pull her back into the water.
He was not certain how many crew were on board but said no one was in danger.
"The main thing now is to get the container vessel back into the sea."
Weather conditions were still treacherous, with heavy seas and strong winds, he said.
Residents of Cape Town's southern suburbs saw a dusting of snow on the buttresses of the mountain above Kirstenbosch through an early-morning break in the clouds.
There was also snow just on the top 150m of Devil's Peak.
It is the first time it has snowed on Table Mountain in seven years.
Operations supervisor of the Table Mountain cableway Peetie Harmse said just before 09:00 that it was even snowing at the lower cable station.
"It's very nice...spectacular," he said.
"At the moment we can't get to the top. We're just monitoring the wind and that now," he said.
An Eskom Western Cape spokesperson, Randall October, said technicians were working to restore power outages in rural areas near George, Ceres and Caledon, where a line had fallen to the ground.
Marianne Olivier of the South African Weather Service's Cape Town office said the cold front had passed the city, and that it would experience only "post-frontal showers" for the rest of the day.
"A bit of rain" was still expected on Wednesday morning, Minimum for Wednesday would be a shivering six degrees, maximum ten, rising to eight and 19 on Friday.
The cold front was heading for the Eastern Cape, but without a significant amount of rainfall.
It would, however, be very cold there, with strong winds along the coast.
- SAPA
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