A huge mudslide led to families from an entire apartment block along Chapman's Peak Drive being evacuated.
|||Cape Town - A huge mudslide led to families from an entire apartment block along Chapman’s Peak Drive being evacuated, while many other beachfront homes and roads on the Atlantic Seaboard were left damaged and submerged.
Alerted by a knock on her balcony door, Caroline Hulton, 68, woke up to find her entire flat swamped by mud and murky water.
Having arrived on holiday from England only on Friday, she was staying at 1 Chapman’s Peak Drive. She grabbed some belongings she’d just unpacked, and left.
The mudslide hit the retaining wall behind the
block of luxury apartments, and she said a security guard had climbed on to her balcony to wake her.
“It was horrible… my apartment is completely destroyed,” Hulton said.
Another resident in the block, Robyn Wilmink, said she thought a fire had broken out. “I woke up around 3am and smelled something funny, like a woody smell. I thought it was a fire but when I looked outside there was like three feet of mud pressing against our wall, which had also damaged the car park and the gate.”
Rescue teams from the NSRI, Disaster Management, the Hout Bay Neighbour-hood Watch and the Community Emergency Response Team evacuated the entire block of flats as a safety precaution.
Precariously perched on a rock close to the centre of the mudslide, Graham Haywood waited anxiously for his 82-year-old father Ronald Haywood, who has Parkinson’s disease, to be brought out.
“It looks like a war zone,” he remarked, looking at a Ford Ranger bakkie lodged deep in the mud. The vehicle had been hit by a tree.
Meanwhile, traffic headed for Hout Bay on Victoria Road was redirected back to Camps Bay, after a burst pipe resulted in the road caving in near Bakoven.
Hout Bay resident Oliver Dods had been sitting in his car waiting for the water to subside, when he saw the road cave in and a parked Jeep go over the edge.
“It was just after 1am. I was on my way to town to fetch my daughter from work. The Jeep was parked on the pavement and the road just collapsed and it fell into the hole. I thought the car had blown up because the electricity box next to the car blew up,” he said.
Water could be seen streaming down into beachfront homes below the section of the missing road, and the power box was destroyed.
A large boulder had also landed on the road just after the Twelve Apostles, further blocking the road.
Chapman’s Peak Drive remained closed to traffic at the time of going to press last night. - Sunday Argus
janis.kinnear@inl.co.za