Warder Attie Appels had a feeling he should get home early from his night shift at George prison.
Had he left 10 minutes later he would not have been home in time to rescue his family from a floodwater torrent that ripped through his house.
They had to be rescued by boat from their second-storey balcony after a wait of nearly two hours, stranded upstairs as much of the neighbourhood disappeared under water.
“It was like being on an island and people could see we were drowning,” said Appels of the surreal experience of staring across at his neighbours, waiting for a National Sea Rescue Institute vessel to pluck them from their suburban home.
“If I had come five minutes later I wouldn’t have found my family alive.”
Appel’s wife, Unit, said the force of the water took them by surprise, forcing doors open and tearing the TV off the lounge wall. Within minutes they had to flee upstairs.
“It was like a sea in front of us,” she said, adding that the family struggled to raise the alarm. “My daughter made a live Facebook video so that people could see and alert somebody to come and help us.”
Monday’s flood drama in George, caused by a downpour of about 40mm in an hour, was just the beginning of a week of weather troubles that also featured extreme wind across much of SA.
George had the added frustration of losing much of its water infrastructure, resulting in a severe water shortage and the deployment of water trucks as residents mopped up their homes.
By Thursday night extreme wind hit the southwestern Cape as air was sucked into a low-pressure system moving across the interior.
Though the extreme weather prompted mutterings about global warming, experts were reluctant to jump to conclusions about how much to attribute to climate change given the natural recurrence of extreme weather events.
Wind-related disruption at Cape Town harbour this week coincided with the start of an in-depth study to determine whether extreme weather events are intensifying, either in severity or frequency.
“The problem we have now is that we need to disentangle what is attributable to a changing climate and what is natural background variability,” said Neville Sweijd of the Alliance for Collaboration on Climate and Earth Systems Science.
The new study will look at a broad spectrum of extreme weather events and locations, including the Port of Cape Town. It will involve international collaboration and is funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF).
A better understanding of extreme events would allow scientists to predict more accurately the ability of ecosystems to cope with extreme weather, Sweijd said.
Scientists were planning to gather next year “to assess what we really know about extreme climate events”.
Extreme events happen all the time. But if they happen too frequently then there isn’t time for ecosystems or economic systems to recover
— Neville Sweijd
He added: “The whole idea is to try and be more accurate in our predictions at different timescales. We are pretty good at weather timescales, decent at seasonal timescales in places, and at climate change scale we think we know the scenarios using models, but we can’t know for sure because we can’t test it.
“While we have the evidence of these trends, there are gaps in our knowledge, especially at local scales.”
Abri de Buys of the NRF’s South African Environment Observation Network said only a detailed comparison of monthly wind data would determine whether the current conditions were abnormal.
“A brief eyeball of the data suggests we are in a windy patch, but it’s nothing unusual and wind speeds are far below the highs we record during winter storms, for example,” De Buys said.
Andries Kruger of the South African Weather Service said the organisation would soon undertake “a thorough analysis” of strong wind trends, but preliminary indications did not suggest recent strengthening.
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