jenniferdebeer

fire on table mountain...

There is a range of mountains that run across the Cape Peninsula, South Africa, and invariably in summer some part of it goes to blazes (quite literally) because some fool with a cigarette has been careless. I may sound weary and resigned to this annual occurrence, but no, this isn´t so. The latest fire has/had been this last week.

Yesterday, all day I´d been receiving the same set of pics from various persons telling me about and illustrating a raging fire on the slopes of Table Mountain. I include one of the pics above. Thing was, I´d received so many copies of the same mail ito. content that I started to wonder if this was some kind of hoax thing going around. Most notable example was an e-mail from my cousin in Australia, that had first gone some loops, passing through New York, Canada, Sydney, and then found its way to my mailbox. Very illustrative of South African diaspora, and life online. Anyhow, what´s frustrating is that I couldn´t get to any news sites when trying to authenticate the story.
And since it was the middle of the night, I didn´t want to call anyone in Cape Town so as to find out... Odd.

See also
Table Mountain blaze rages on
http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/0,,2-7-1442_1870435,00.html
and
Table Mountain fire battle won
http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__national&articleid=262576

posted by Jennifer A. DeBeer @ 09:18