By Mike Loewe, Eastern Cape News
Thursday 4 September 2008
At 5pm on the first day of spring, the sea rose massively along the South African coastline. Down at Port Alfred, it was a beautiful, almost windless, sunny afternoon.
People stared as the surf, driven by the most ferocious and largest storm ever tracked by Cape Town surfcaster and old Rhodian, Spike (www.wavescape.co), unleashed 30-foot plus swells directly onto our stunned Sunshine Coast.
Yep, the tar, boarding, fencing, retaining walls, a red merc, a memorial bench to a local surfer, and most importantly, the buffer sand dunes, were torn down, lifted up, swamped or gouged. As the song went, it was indeed “like castles in the sand…”
For me, it was the silence of the swells that pushed far up the Kowie, flooding sections of the CBD which was freaky.
Then came the cracking, splintering, explosions of jetty and deck planking, designer pot plants, lamp posts and trendy Victorian lamps as the surf swept past the lounges of at least two homes. So this was how open plan meets open ocean, I mused.
Stone walling on the banks collapsed leaving gaping red soil overhung with lawn.
Sets of swell, dappled silver and smooth like the beloved lines which travel over half the globe to reach Indonesia, feathered at this particular Port Alfred home, and broke along the bank, sending up a weird spume and foam.
This, more than a kilometre upstream.
A man stood by speaking on his cellphone probably to the absentee owner. A crowd of five got splashed.
I parked my car next to the river near the Old Mill. The 1.5m drop suddenly vanished as a shapely swell sidled down the stone-wall side, lapping the edge of my tyres. Unreal.
A millionaire’s boat broke free and was rescued. Water crept up the lawn of a home facing the mouth. The NSRI patrolled the river.
They would not be putting out to sea. This was as far as they’d be going.
That’s when I noticed that of the hundreds of watchers, nobody was going near the sea. Our Mother Ocean, our fabulous playground had become unpredictable, dangerous, hostile to humanity.
This was good; in the past people have deluded themselves that it’s OK to walk the East and West piers during big surf. Quite a few have been washed off.
City officials are checking damage to the 140-year-old piers, but there’s no doubt that a collapsed section on West has been extended. Guido’s restaurant, where locals and Grahamstonians gathered to sluk beer and watch the spectacle, was left with a corner of foundation exposed. I will be surprised if there is no structural damage to these much-loved coastal landmarks.
Rhodes Ichthyology head prof Pete Britz says if those piers go, so does an enormous amount of protection from the open ocean swell. This is not good for the marina.
I stood on a dune at halfway house and looked. I’ve surfed this stretch for 31 years. There was no beach. Just sea and dunes.
Surf receded 80m where once it was dry and hard to walk, and then surged, a dollop of foamy water sploshing the top of the barrier dune. Behind, on lower flat ground was the parking lot. How thin and tiny our natural defence against this enormous power.
I’ve seen the hard-core daily press pics showing the elderly being swamped Tsunami-like by white water, or huge spumes against a railroad. That’s hard news stuff.
My experience was different. This felt like years of talk about rising sea levels, warming oceans and air, instability and unpredictability in the atmosphere – a geophysical event brought on solely by the activities of humanity – was finally being revealed.
The experts agree -- and they do not agree.
A-rated scientist and surfer, Dr Richard Cowling of Seal Point, feels the melting ice caps have not yet caused enough rise in the ocean to explain it. But the sea is rising and soon it will be a very real factor.
However, he says developers have ignored warnings and continue to build on vulnerable flood plains and sand dunes, putting enormous stress on our coast.
Yet, he does say the wave size and period on Monday was “certainly unprecedented”.
So most experts, including Garth Sampson of the Port Elizabeth Weather office, agree that it all came together to form the perfectly awesome swell – spring tides, a monstrous storm wider than eight African countries forming to our south, a swell hurled straight at us … but nobody with the necessary science cred or insight has any explanation on how rising temperatures of between 1 and 2 degrees, warming oceans, the exodus of entire species, extinctions and all the rest, and this massive swell storm are all part of the same slouching beast, this alter-ego created by us.
Science and governments are in agreement – human-created climate change affects every part of the globe, and yet nobody, at least here in the Eastern Cape, has a clue about how this storm was affected by these global changes.
How come we are so clever and yet so clueless?
Are we watching ourselves destroy our own habitat?
Any experts out there? Email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
No nutters please.
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