Storms hit the Western Cape - flood and spring tides! Switching on my power and making my tools wet

This picture above is from the Daily Maverick, a newspaper in South Africa.

In a nutshell, there were warnings of a massive storm hitting the Western Cape. A week before that, there were warnings of massive Spring Tide waves.

The news and the coverage by the media highlighted all of the pertinent devastation. Some pictures were circulated by people that I know and people I do not of views of the floods etc and it got to such a point that family and friends elsewhere in the country/world started asking us if we are alright.

So this is my personal report about what has happened.

Somehow, my particular area, Table View, was mostly sheltered from any massive storms. It sure did rain a lot and quite hard, but nothing to disturb us.

There is a river nearby that has split its banks but the bridge over it that I use to get to work is fully functional. The river first goes into a Vlei and this is also full and then it travels down to a lagoon and this is also full of course.

These water bodies cannot raise much higher than sea level and the construction of civil services and buildings nearby were made to last this.

The nearby informal settlement used to flood quite badly because people started to build their structures in the marshlands beyond the points where they were told they could not build and promptly flooded after the rains. I hope they removed all of these houses and I have seen nothing about that in the news.

I drove through the docks yesterday and I saw some containers that had been blown over. Stacks of 3 laying askance, the bottom one badly bent. Some roofs were destroyed and of course... some porta-potties were laying on their sides.

At home, over the long weekend we had only one real result:

We were supposed to be on loadshedding with no power but... due to storm damage... our power was ON.

How does that work actually?

Anyway. Maybe it is badly worded and out of context. The outage did not stop because of storm damage to the power grid. Rather it was suspended to give people respite.

And then of course our gangbox at the docks took water.

I had sent someone to retrieve a tool from the box that we could use on another site and he had reported that there was water in the gangbox. There was not a lot of water, but enough to make us worried about our electric tools.

Chief among these worries was the Recovery machine which I took back to the office and stripped it apart to check if there was any water inside it. I did not find much and I think that will be OK.

And that's it. Were are left relatively unscathed this time and for that I am thankful. From what I understand there are a lot of people badly affected by the storm conditions.

One pet peeve I have of course is that flooding tends to happen more often at the informal (illegal) settlements because they built on grounds unsuitable to residential housing and flood risk being one of them. In the poorer areas, people are more likely to litter and then that litter clogs up the stormwater drains and causes flooding in the streets.
The stormwater system of Cape Town is built to take on massive amounts of rain but cannot do so if people keep discarding little into or around them. Eventually, the water will drag your litter to a drain and there it will get stuck. It is common sense but usually, people just do not care.

Thank you for reading this little post. I am doing my best to just get back on the writing horse and not get stagnant. Last week took a huge blow to my writing flow and I am trying to re-establish the habit!

Cheers!
@zakludick

Hive South Africa