'Tornado' panic causes chaos
2007-10-08 23:46
Elise Tempelhoff, Buks Viljoen and Retha Grobbelaar
Johannesburg - Banks sent their staff home early, schools closed earlier than usual and notices were even posted at a university to warn staff of an approaching "tornado" which was to have struck Gauteng and Mpumalanga by late Monday afternoon.
People were panic-stricken as e-mails and SMSs spread the word, warning people against "huge storms and tornadoes".
One SMS said a Sappi weather forecaster had warned that a typhoon would hit Nelspruit at 17:00.
Beeld's telephones rang incessantly with readers complaining that they were unable to access the weather service's home page.
Warned that a storm would hit Gauteng
In turn, staff at the weather service complained that their website was so overloaded that even they couldn't access it.
One such e-mail, from Netcare 911, warned that a storm would hit Gauteng at 17:00.
It was, however, not official and had been forwarded by a Netcare employee.
At North West University's Vaal Triangle campus, this e-mail was posted on notice boards.
ER24 spokesperson Werner Vermaak said: "People panicked and kept on phoning our control room to find out what they should do. When we said we knew nothing of a tornado, they asked us how this could be possible."
The traffic flow picked up earlier than usual around Johannesburg as people headed home.
Some people reported that the 60km journey between Johannesburg and Pretoria had taken them up to three hours.
Wikus Myburgh, the manager of disaster control at the West Rand district municipality, said some schools in Randfontein had closed early.
West Rand without water
Gareth Stacey of ER24 said principals at Vanderbijl Park schools had apparently called parents and asked them to collect their children early.
Large parts of the West Rand were still without water or electricity on Monday after huge storms there on Saturday.
Meteorologists were to have visited the area on Monday, but a weather service forecaster said it had not been possible.
"Our phones were ringing the whole day. It was chaos."
The senior manager of weather forecasting, Mnikeli Ngabambi, said by 17:30 on Monday a warning of severe storms still applied to Gauteng, the eastern part of North West and the southern Mpumalanga area.
According to him the weather service could only indicate which areas would be hit and how severe it would be about an hour before a storm struck.
Roofs blown off
Beeld said by the time it went to press, there was a report of a man killed by lightning at Vereeniging.
Mpumalanga residents were preparing for another torrential downpour after ten houses had been damaged in a freak storm that battered Standerton and the neighbouring areas of Sakhile and Rooikoppen at the weekend.
Sakhile resident Madula Ngobe said many roofs, including his own, had been blown off in Saturday night's storm.
Gerhard Rheeder, spokesperson for the Christian Party in the Mpumalanga legislature, said his party had appealed to the government to aid victims of the storm as a matter of urgency.