Cape Town doesn’t look its best today.
It looks like a scene from a disaster movie, with floods, broken trees, branches and damaged buildings everywhere.
We did get completely battered by yesterday’s storm.
But… give it a couple of weeks (ok, or maybe a month), and all that will be tidied up and forgotten about, and Cape Town will still be the most desirable city on the continent.
Which has its drawbacks:
But still, you’d rather be here than anywhere else.
Monumental weather today.
Over 100mm of rain, winds gusting to 120kph, just absolute carnage.
Biggest storm this century for the Mother City, allegedly.
I’m finding it hard to disagree.
Floods everywhere, trees down – one killing a motorist just around the corner from us – branches all over the place. It’s going to take a while to clear up.
School went ahead for us, but plenty didn’t. And everyone has the day off tomorrow…
…which seems weird, given that today was horrific and dangerous, and tomorrow is just going to be wholly unpleasant. But I doubt that many students will be complaining.
There was a 1½ hour period this morning where nothing could land at Cape Town airport:
Imagine leaving Johannesburg, and then – 4 hours later – ending up in… Johannesburg.
Heartbreakingly awful. Thoughts and prayers.
Locally, there is plenty of damage, with trees down all over the neighbourhood. With the polyphagous shot hole borer beetle epidemic having weakened many of the oak trees around the area, the winds were just too much for a lot of them, and the results are pretty devastating.
If the forecast is correct (and it’s been unerringly accurate today), then we’re just in for about 20mm of rain tomorrow, which is still a lot, unless you’ve had 110mm the previous day, in which case you feel like grabbing your swimsuit and then heading to the beach.
Hopefully, with less wind and less rain, there will be an opportunity to start the clear up: not least for me in our garden. Although, maybe I actually quite like our new rim-flow pool.
Right. That’s it. Summer ended a couple of weeks or a bit more ago, and Autumn has clearly just been bypassed.
I say this because OMG WTF BBQ have you seen the rain forecast for tomorrow and Monday in the Western Cape?
Bad in Cape Agulhas:
Badder in Cape Town:
I’ve been doing some rudimentary calculations, and that’s a lot of rain.
And this is Black South Easter rain, not a cold front. An overflowing shelf of precipitation, pinned against the Cape coast for 48 hours, not going anywhere.
Might be advisable to check your gutters ahead of the winter, like, now. Today.
And then wrap up warmly, grab some red wine, light the fire, and hunker down.
Another warm day. Very windy, but pleasant enough.
But it’s dark and grey now, with menacing clouds advancing over the mountain.
Yes, the storm is coming, but I also have to remind myself that it is winter and the sun does go down at about this time anyway, so that might well be the reason for at least some of the darkness.
But none of the menacing.
I, for one, am looking forward to a bit of drama and the disappearance of this high pressure, dry, stuffy, polluted air with all the sinus, allergies and static electric shocks.
The weather warnings are for “Damaging winds” and “Disruptive rain” with “Significant impact” (their capitalisation) from this evening. I’m going to let the gardener know that he doesn’t have to come in tomorrow.
No-one is going to want to be out and about in that.
Quite reasonably.
Hail, thunder, lightning.
They said it was going to be exciting.
The view from our bedroom window suggests that they weren’t wrong.
(Also, see here.)