St. Patrick's Day fire
(click to see the full photo)


I don't know if anyone heard about the huge fire in Cape Town last night that engulfed a large part of the mountainside, but I thought I would post and say that my house is still standing. It was the mountain that I just climbed a few weeks ago, the one that has the UCT campus at its base - luckily they were able to keep the fire from spreading to campus. It was amazing and terrifying to watch; we were all mostly in awe, I don't think anyone had seen such a large scale forest fire up close before. They think it was the work of an arsonist who started the fire by the Rhodes Memorial (see picture in previous post). Today there have been helicopters flying all over the area with huge buckets hanging from them, there is a reservoir on campus that they have been swooping low to dip in and refill the buckets. The fire is mostly out, but the land is still smoldering and they are just dumping as much water as they can to squash the remaining embers. There is a great deal of smoke and the once green and growing mountainside is now completely scorched. The scene from my window has changed quite a bit. When we were driving into the city today you could see how the fire went right up to the highway! Type "Table Mountain fire 2009" into google if you want to read the news reports on it.