Torrential rain on Thursday brought chaos to Cape Town, flooding shack areas and roads and causing major traffic snarl-ups.
Several people were ferried to higher ground by boat from the aptly named River Club in Observatory when the nearby Liesbeeck River burst its banks.
Cape Town disaster management chief Geoff Laskey said a number of informal settlements in flood-prone areas of the peninsula were affected by the deluge.
The city is assisting people with temporary shelter in venues such as community halls, plus blankets and food.
His ”guesstimate” is that 1 000 or 2 000 people were affected.
The acting disaster relief coordinator for the Red Cross Society in the Western Cape, Michael Jacobs, said his organisation will be serving hot meals for about 2 000 people at Masiphumelele informal settlement at Kommetjie.
Red Cross volunteers will also distribute about 3 000 blankets there.
He said other relief organisations have been mandated to help at settlements on the Cape Flats.
River dampens spirits at River Club
At the River Club, staff and visitors were ferried out in rubber boats after the Liesbeeck River flooded the ground floor of the building and its parking area.
Dance teacher Shelley Angelil said the river poured into the parking lot and the building soon after she arrived for a class about 8.45am.
Her car ended up in water to just below the windows, while other vehicles were actually bobbing around in the flood.
She said an Automobile Association (AA) emergency vehicle that was called in itself stalled in the water, and had to be rescued by a larger AA recovery truck.
Flatbed trucks also hauled several other vehicles out of the water, but some car owners were happy merely to wait until the flood subsided.
Some people in the restaurant on the ground floor made themselves comfortable on a platform above the water level, built a fire and began breaking out the beers from the bar.
Others, at the club for a conference, missed flights back to Johannesburg while their luggage was in their waterlogged cars.
A few people had waded out, but the water reached above waist level before they got to higher ground.
Angelil said she was ferried out on a rubber duck belonging to a person summoned by a company with waterlogged offices in a building alongside the parking lot.
”He came to rescue their computers, and then he came along and rescued us,” she said.
She left after watching her own car being pulled out and sent off to her insurer’s salvage centre in Epping.
Angelil said she never had any fears for her own safety, and that the people trapped at the club had generally been in good spirits throughout their ordeal.
”Once they let go of hoping that their cars were going to make it, then it just became ‘let’s see what happens next’,” she said.
Laskey said about 30 people were taken out of the club in rubber boats provided by the provincial emergency medical services and the city’s fire department.
Traffic chaos
Cape Town traffic department spokesperson Kevin Heckrath said several roads were closed, and that sections of the Liesbeeck Parkway and Paarden Island roads remained shut on Thursday afternoon.
There were 10 accidents during the morning, including an overturned bakkie on the M5, when emergency services had some problems freeing an occupant, and an articulated vehicle that jack-knifed on the N1, blocking two of three lanes.
A mudslide on De Waal Drive at Hospital Bend was cordoned off, then cleared.
”We asked for rain but we didn’t expect to get so much. It’s unbelievable,” he said.
A minibus taxi overturned on Hospital Bend, where northbound lanes were awash in a river of brown, silt-laden water.
A small lake formed below the Holiday Inn on the Eastern Boulevard, reducing traffic to a crawl as motorists queued to get around it.
A courier company bakkie that churned through the middle sputtered to a halt on the other side.
People coming into work past Paarden Island encountered similar pools of water and many vehicles broke down.
AA spokesperson Gary Ronald said the organisation had responded to 622 calls between 6am and 11am.
Normal call-outs would be ”a 10th of that”, he said. ”Most of these were for damp problems.”
At Waltons, an office furnishings and stationery company in Beach Road, Woodstock, a parking lot was flooded.
”God sent us an abundance of rain,” joked one employee. ”Within minutes the water was as high as the windows of the cars. It was quite exciting.”
Some vehicles were towed out of the water, she said.
One section of the lot was still flooded late on Thursday afternoon and staff in the receiving and human resources sections had to use alternate routes out of their building.
Weather to remain rainy
Cape Town weather office staffer Carlton Fillis said 45mm of rain was measured at the city’s airport between 8am and noon on Thursday.
”That’s a lot of water,” he said.
He said the wet weather would continue for most of the day, becoming more showery towards Friday morning.
The greater part of Saturday would be partly cloudy, with another cold front approaching on Saturday night. — Sapa