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It behoves me to be the harbinger of gloom, so let me say Thursday was expected to be a great day of sunshine.
But Friday it started looking dodgy again and by Saturday those damn high-pressure bullies were expected to be back at it, trapping the little low-pressure cells and making them bawl.
This dreadful system of cut-off low-pressure cells which brings us deluges and sends road patches popping into the sky, leaving our roads riddled with mortar fire-like holes, just keeps on happening — until my money on Windy.com runs out next Friday.
Windy is lurid and addictive, but mainly it is turning out to be freakishly accurate.
You want to open it and click on rain and thunder, then click on that little red triangle on the left so that it becomes two vertical stripes, and sit back and watch in horror.
Unfortunately, like all free stuff, there comes a time when you have to pay.
It looks like Windy.com gives us six free days and then the movies are splatter-stamped with the word “premium” and presumably some functions stop working.
I encourage all you, my one, maybe two, readers, to become Windy.com scrollers.
Why? Because the number of times I have peered ahead by a few days and said, Whoa, that looks like a cut-off low, and then it happens, along with an actual media release by the SA Weather Service (SAWS). I am left going, sheez, this thing really is a crystal ball.
But please don’t tell the lovely people at SAWS that we follow all the independents, the Vox Weather, Kobus Botha, Windguru, Windfinder, because it makes the official forecaster look a little staid and stiff.
They are really cool weather boffins there, and it’s not their fault that they work under the aegis of a bipolar government which forges ahead with fossil fuel oil and gas shenanigans, while repeatedly telling the world how on-sides we are with climate goals and renewable energy.
So let’s all of us, who are sane, rational, reasonable people, and who are faced with the stark reality that our weather systems have gone on the blink, agree to start taking unofficial animated weather forecasters seriously.
I am full of respect and pride over our SAWS people for the amazing early warning systems they have come up with, those yellow to orange, and pray never red, warnings come with very detailed and persistent advice and instructions.
But do they always come on time and do they always reach those they need to reach?
I worry about the poor.
The vast number of people who have never managed to get a promised home and are forced to live in low-lying areas and who must face the constant gaslighting that they somehow chose to live in harm’s way.
I urge them to take the route of the Quarry Road squatter community on the banks of the Palmiet River in Durban.
They, during the killer “rain bomb” on April 11 and 12 2022, used their own WhatsApp-based early warning system and evacuated.
In an award-winning piece of interactive online journalism, The Outlier reported (perfectstorm.theoutlier.co.za/): “The warning came through to the Quarry Road community on the banks of the Palmiet River via a [WhatsApp] group chat platform late that Monday night: Don’t go to sleep. The river is rising. There’s more rain on the way. Be ready to evacuate.
“Families living along this stretch of one of Durban’s 18 major rivers believe it was this warning that spared them any deaths by drowning, when floodwaters tore many of their makeshift board-and-tin homes apart.
“But on [Monday] April 11 2022, a worst-case scenario was nevertheless unfolding.
“Community leader Nomandla Nqanula had eyes on a nearby bridge.
“She snapped a photo and fired it off to the city’s disaster management team, showing that tree debris and other flotsam was snarled up against it, trapping the water’s escape.
“A short while later the final instruction came through from the disaster unit. It was time to get to higher ground.
“It was like a disaster movie, Nqanula says, with containers from nearby shops caught in the current and slamming into dwellings.
“Then there was the final terrifying escape as she and her neighbours formed a human chain to cross the nearby M19 highway which was disappearing under the fast-flowing water.
“When the sun rose on Tuesday April 12, there was nothing but a hole gouged into the bank where Nqanula’s home had stood.
“like many, everything she owned had been washed away. Their lives, at least, had been spared.
“Other communities in the eThekwini municipality on SA’s east coast, more commonly known as the city of Durban, weren’t so lucky.”
The official death toll was 459.
Since I have been given the pen for seven years — seven years of sufferance for you dear reader! — I am going to insist that my readers are looking up and about, that you are climate smart and ready.
The biggest tragedies happen to those who live in disbelief, in isolationism and too often, banging about in the drum of their own hubris.
I am the first to applaud when a cold front skids off into the sea and misses us in Buffalo City, or takes longer to arrive, or is not as severe as was forecast.
But don't be dossing in a bed in Cefani hut number 3 as the waters rise to the level of your bed.
This is just a metaphor, né, the famous front-row cottages were indeed flooded but the berm broke, the river emptied and they will dry out again soon, I hope.
But everywhere we look in our cities and towns this week will be the debris of tar and leaning cement infrastructure.
We took a beating and there will be more, I tell my top fan, who negotiates every pothole with superb skill, until they cannot be avoided in the dark, or hidden by a sploosh, or some other terrified driver has to swerve in front of you to avoid their chasm.
It now becomes a public effort to get the metro to dole out the work to its contractors and to get on with it.
We want them to show some urgency and stop with the cow pat repairs — demand a square-shaped hole so that tyres don’t easily twist them out.
Now for the good news: I am going for a walk to a dune above Bonza Bay, where we will hang out quaffing Appletizer and snacking on junk as we watch the sun go down.
It’s an extraordinary place and in the still of the gloaming, makes our home look almost ethereal.
This is why we live here for though it seems to rain and rain, the sun is shining again.
So shine on you crazy faux diamonds.
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