Looking at Sunset Beach over Diep River - Cole's Pic
What a winter we are having here in Cape Town. Two weeks ago I wrote about a major storm with gale force winds which I enjoyed so much, and here we are after another weekend of huge amounts of rain.
On Saturday, we had the second highest rainfall in a 24 hour period since recording began. 55mm of rain fell, compared with the record set in 1985 of 61mm. It has truly been a very wet weekend.
On Friday night, we had guests over for supper. They live just a few blocks away from us, but had to drive all around trying to find a route to our house since most of the roads in our suburb had flooded. That was the first clue that we were going to have it bad.
On Saturday, the news started coming in about flooding happening in various parts of Cape Town. You can see some quite spectacular shots from around town here. It has been worse than usual with thousands of people in the informal settlements particularly finding themselves forced out of their homes.
View of the vlei with the RC airfield in the centre thoroughly submerged
Now this brings me to today. The rain has calmed down considerably since Sunday, however, this morning on the way to work I discovered that Otto du Plessis Drive, which is my main route into work, was closed due to flooding. What had happened is that overnight the runoff further inland had flooded the Diep River catchment area between Tableview and Milnerton. It took me two hours to get to work this morning as compared to my normal half an hour, but the temptation to see the water was just too strong for me to resist.
Well, by this evening the waters had subsided enough to allow the road to be reopened for my commute home, however, Claudia, Cole and myself did go take a look at the high water so we could take a few photos.
I do know that times like this can be very hard for a lot of people, and I do have great sympathy for them, but I just cannot help but look at wonder at the forces of nature.
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