By our intrepid Eastern Cape guy Mike Loewe
Tuesday 2 September 2008
City officials are still checking damage to the Port Alfred coastline. The antique 140-year-old piers at the Kowie River mouth have suffered damage, but are still intact. Business owners say the Kowie River beachfront is still a mess of cement blocks, rocks, sand and broken planking. But city officials say cleaners will be getting in to the affected areas this morning.
Officials say the hole in the West Pier has widened a lot since yesterday, but that the 140-year-old structures appear to have withstood the power of the surf.
The surfers’ car park at the East Pier was damaged. A newly built brick retainer wall was knocked down as the swell moved down the pier, up the beach and flowed over the parking lot and into the river.
“Bru, it looked as if the car park was a rapid on the Orange. The water cascaded over the bank into the river in a way which would have made kayakers moerse happy,” said one surfer.
In an eerie scene, the sun sank over the hills on a windless day casting a silvery light on three foot swells which swept silently up the Kowie River, pausing only to break on the eastern stone wall banks of the Port Alfred Royal Marina.
That’s when the valley echoed with the sound of splinterinig planking, pot plants cracking and glass smashing as trendy lamposts were pole-axed by the swells.
One woman was seen holding her hands over her face, reflecting a general incomprehension and disbelief among the hundreds of gawking local residents.
Cars crowded the road along the West Bank as water from the incoming swells lapped over the edge.
Surf broke about two kilometres out to sea, making the normal surf break look like a “shorey”, said one surfer.
Tidal pressure pushed back in the city’s storm drains, flooding a the local Spar and covering a boardwalk around the local duck pond – an extension of the estuary.
An intitially delighted Rhodes Icthyology head and passionate surfer, Professor Pete Britz said at 5pm: “We knew what was coming thanks to Spike’s amazing surf report so we moved out our equipment from our marine laboratory (on the bank of the Kowie) higher up.
However, Britz said later that pulses at about 5.30pm did indeed reach the pumps and deep freezers causing damage. -- ECN
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