JOHANNESBURG – Cape Town firefighters struggled on Monday with a wildfire that engulfed the slopes of the city’s famous Table Mountain and destroyed parts of the University of Cape Town’s archive library.
Helicopters poured water into the area to try to stop the fire, which started on Sunday and was probably caused by an abandoned fire, according to South African National Parks officials. But when the wind picked up power overnight and caused the flames to blow, the fire spread to neighborhoods on the foothills of the mountain and some homes had to be evacuated Monday morning.
Anton Bredell, the minister responsible for environmental affairs and development planning for the Western Cape region, said in a statement: “The wind speed is expected to increase during the day, which could have an impact on the deployment of firefighting from the air.”
“The helicopters cannot fly if the wind is too strong and the visibility is too weak, but the situation will be fully assessed,” he added. “It’s going to be a very difficult day.”
On Sunday night, police arrested a man in his thirties in connection with new fires that broke out on Table Mountain when the wildfire raged. according to Jean-Pierre Smith, a Cape Town City Councilor who sits on the mayor’s safety and security committee.
The veld fire started on Sunday around 09:00 on the lower slopes of Devil’s Peak, one of the rugged ridges that form part of the iconic Table Mountain backdrop to Cape Town. The fire engulfed and destroyed a hillside restaurant before moving down to the university campus, which was largely built on the slopes of the mountain.
Several buildings, including a historic mill and the school library, in which important archives and book collections are located, soon caught fire, and waves of thick white smoke rolled across the city. So far no deaths have been reported, but five firefighters have sustained injuries, according to officials.
According to Nombuso Shabalala, a university spokesman, about 4,000 students were evacuated from the campus residences on Sunday. The university announced on Sunday that it will cease operations until at least Tuesday.
Numerous students have been shown on social media, some of them small bags clinging to residence buildings as the fire engulfed the nearby hill. Busisiwe Mtsweni, an undergraduate student in finance and accounting, was on the university’s upper campus at about 12am when ‘everyone fell into panic mode’, she said in a phone call.
Sparks from the mountain ignited smaller fires between the buildings, and clouds of smoke made it difficult to breathe, she said. When Mrs Mtsweni and her friends make a detour to their home to seize their belongings, they come across a student who looked like an asthma attack and lead her, coughing, away from the smoky part of campus. . Mtsweni was later evacuated by bus and spent the night in a hotel.
By Sunday evening, a reading room for special collections in the university library was killed by the fire, according to university officials. The reading room housed parts of the university’s African Studies collection – containing works on Africa and South Africa printed before 1925, hard-to-find volumes in European and African languages, and other rare books – as well as a rich film archive, according to to Niklas Zimmer, a library manager at the university.
“Some of our valuable collections have been lost, but a full assessment can only be done once the building has been declared safe,” said Ujala Satgoor, executive director of libraries at the University of Cape Town. in a statement.
While the university recently embarked on a huge effort to digitize the school’s collections, only a ‘thin’ part of the archive for special collections has been transferred due to the enormous amount of material and the icy pace of the work, says Mr. . Zimmer, who led the program. Mr. Zimmer explained that a single cabinet of microfilms can take an entire lifetime to process.
University officials said they were hopeful that most of the archive – which is housed in two basements under the library and protected by a system of fire doors – could be saved. But on Monday, while scholars and librarians waited to hear the extent of the damage, many people raised the possibility that the basement could have been flooded during the firefight.
“A lot of unique things are probably gone,” said Sibusiso Nkomo, a historian. student who is a member of an interdisciplinary archive research unit on campus.
“We have lost valuable history that tells us where we came from,” he added, noting that the state of mind among his colleagues was “traumatized and devastated.”
The veld fire is the latest in a series of devastating flames that have swept through the Western Cape province in South Africa over the past few years. In 2015, fires tore through the suburbs of Cape Town for four days, destroying approximately 15,000 hectares of land. Two years later, another veld fire tore through a coastal village in the province of Knysna, killing at least four people and forcing some 10,000 to evacuate their homes.
The massive veld fires are fueled by a flammable mixture of fire-sensitive vegetation native to South Africa – known as fynbos – and especially flammable tree species, such as tooth trees and pines, which colonists brought to the Western Cape and which contribute to the accidental spread of fires.
To prevent uncontrollable veld fires, many ecologists have warned that officers in the national park should do more frequent prescribed burns of the fynbos or intentionally light fires in areas where excess vegetation needs to be removed. But in Cape Town, where the outskirts of the city have spread out on the foothills of the mountain, prescribed burns are particularly severe, and park officials have resisted residents who fear their homes could be accidentally destroyed.
“If it does not burn, all the vegetation is just sitting there, and it’s just a matter of time,” said dr. Alanna Rebelo, a postdoctoral researcher specializing in ecology at Stellenbosch University in the Western Cape, said. “We had this big bonfire that was just waiting to happen.”