Table View residents are calling the area a "war zone" as a task team tries to reduce the Seli 1 wreck.
|||Cape town - Table View residents are calling the area a “war zone” after what has been weeks filled with rattling explosions as task teams reduce the Seli 1 wreck.
For 23-year-old Henco Lotz it has all become too much.
The reserve police officer and local business owner has watched as shock waves from the explosions have slowly destroyed his home on Tritonia Road, which is about 2km from where the Seli 1 is grounded on Blaauwberg beach.
He pointed to cracks in his ceiling which continue to widen as the blasts ring out across his neighbourhood.
When work on the wreck began again this morning, the shock waves from one of the five blasts dislodged the light in his bedroom, sending it crashing down in a rain of plaster and screws.
“Every day I feel like I’m waking up in some war-torn country, I’m just fed up.”
Lotz said the entire house rattled when the blasting began, sending his two dogs, Vulcan and Jack, into a frenzy.
“I have to put them in a store room just to stop them from trying to run away. But even there, they are jumping out of the window.”
He added that he could feel warm air rushing around him after a big explosion.
“My fiancée can’t sleep when she gets back from her night shift. I can’t work during the day… And then after all that, I drive past the wreck and nothing has changed. It still looks the same… When will this end?”
Lotz’s mother Candice, who owns a house on the same property, said the blasts had caused cracks to spring up all over her house, including the walls.
Rina Swanepoel, an administrator at the Seascape guest house, said she could feel the shock waves rattle the building.
“Luckily, we have no damage. It’s just very noisy, even for us and we are far away from the blasts… It was meant to be finished ages ago, now it just seems like they are desperate and throwing whatever they can at (the wreck).”
A local window repair business said they had received several calls to come and replace windows that had been shattered by the shock waves.
The Seli 1 wreck has been an eyesore to many of Table View’s residents since its engine failed and the vessel ran aground on Blaauwberg beach in 2009. Carrying 30 000 tons of coal and 660 tons of heavy fuel oil, the wreck has been occasionally haemorrhaging fossil fuel for the past four years.
The City of Cape Town, the SA Navy and Environmental Affairs teamed up to remove the wreck earlier this year.
But on Thursday, a job that looked as though it was done had to be reassessed after the team discovered additional parts of the vessel that had to be reduced.
The city’s disaster management spokesman, Wilfred Solomons-Johannes, said that the task team was still implementing precautions to protect the environment from any pollution.
The latest stage of blasting is set to last until Friday next week, but this might change if the operation carries on.
kieran.legg@inl.co.za
Cape Argus