Long-term fire plans re-examined at seminar
‘Knysna fires served as an early wake-up call for Southern Cape’
SOUTHERN Cape environmentalists and researchers are set to revisit long-term strategic planning during a seminar next week commemorating last year’s devastating Knysna fires.
The Southern Cape landowners initiative (SCLI), in collaboration with the sustainability research unit at the School of Natural Resource Management, Nelson Mandela University, will host the Garden Route Environmental Seminar.
The SCLI’s Cobus Meiring said tough questions would be asked in terms of planning for future urban expansion and on where the Southern Cape might be heading towards in terms of long-term planning against a backdrop of climate change.
“The 2017 Knysna fires served as an early wake-up call for the residents of the Southern Cape, and those responsible for future planning in the region agree that it can never again be business as usual,” said Meiring.
He said the SCLI had for years promoted the eradication of severe infestation of invasive alien plants in the region.
“What is already apparent is that there needs to be substantial social and community participation and training. This is where SCLI and the Garden Route rebuild initiative will focus our attention.”
Deadly fires ravaged the Knysna and Plettenberg Bay area, resulting in the largest convergence of firefighting personnel and resources at one incident in South Africa’s history.
SA Weather Services senior forecaster Lebohang Makgati said that cold fronts in the interior of the province caused strong winds, which had a danger of creating veld fires as in the 2017 fire.
“We record the data and our models show whether conditions indicate a strong chance of veld fires for the region. This information is then sent to the southern region’s disaster management, as well as the Department of Agriculture and Forestry, who will then look at the vegetation in the region,” she said.
The seminar will be hosted on June 6 and 7 in Brenton-onSea and for more information please visit the SCLI website at www.scli.org.za
THE City of Cape Town has demolished the Kildare Road spring in Newlands. For more than 100 years people have been coming to this water point. No trace of this historically significant spring remains.
Three days after the spring was shut down on May 23, I went to the site of the water collection point to see what was left of it.
Riyaz Rawoot’s improvised PVC pipe structure with its 26 water points is gone, and the water point is now completely covered by concrete slabs.
The water now flows straight into the river. A tall fence separated me from the flowing water that I had once collected there so freely.
I felt a sense of loss. I had grown accustomed to this lively meeting spot, where water collectors and water porters from all over the city had first converged during the start of the “Day Zero” crisis.
The place was eerily quiet. After a few minutes, a middle-aged coloured man strolled up to the spot where the PVC pipe once was.
Like me, he seemed to be in a state of disbelief. “What am I going to do now? I need this water to keep my water bill down,” he told me.
We reminisced about this former space of free flowing water and conversations. I then gave him directions to the new collection point near the Newlands public swimming pool.
City officials and local Newlands residents insist that the problem has been solved, and that the people can now collect their water at the new, highly regulated water point.
This new collection point is about 1km away from the homes of the Newlands residents who had complained so bitterly about the noise, the traffic congestion and the influx of “outsiders” who mostly came from the poor and working-class neighbourhoods of the Cape Flats.
But what these officials and residents could not see was that this spring was more than simply a pipe filled with flowing water. It was a space saturated with history, memories and sociality.
During the present water crisis, the Kildare Road spring became one of those rare spaces where a diverse public came together in this deeply divided city. Every day for months, I drove past the spring on the way to drop off my children at school. Kildare Road was always busy, with cars parked on the pavement and trolleys loaded with water containers.
From my conversations at the spring, I learnt that most of the people collected water at the spring to lower their monthly water bills, to save municipal water in a time of scarcity, or because they enjoyed the sweet taste and purity of the water. Some came there as a ritual of remembrance and to reminisce about when they or their relatives lived in Newlands Village before the forced removals of the 1960s.
It was a place that served many different needs for many people.
Now this convivial, heterogeneous social space is gone, buried under concrete. What is to be done?” Steven Robins Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Stellenbosch University