27 November 2008
Owners of several hundred holiday homes on the beautiful Breede River are still reeling from damage wreaked by the worst flood in more than a century.
The picturesque 40km of winding river is home to at least 420 smallholdings and plots which hold some of the Cape's most expensive and sought-after holiday houses.
And few were spared the floodwaters which rose dramatically to unimaginable levels on Thursday night a fortnight ago and raged south towards the river mouth at Witsands over the three days which followed.
"At my house the water rose by 14,5m above its usual level," one resident reported on Wednesday night.
She asked that she not be named as the property market is her livelihood and the devastation was equally bad news for most home-owners.
"We saw more or less 100 to 150 jetties, a complete white wooden house, a green wooden house with its stove pipe, and at least 50 boats float past our house."
Most of the dozens of boats - including expensive speedboats - which washed down the river were eventually snagged by branches in homeowners' trees downstream, but at least three were washed out to sea at Witsands, dozens of kilometres downstream, and were dashed on the coastline's rocks.
Rare stories have emerged, however, of boats in boathouses which did nothing more than rise with the floodwaters and then drop down into position again days later miraculously undamaged - one with a bowl of dry pet food unspilled.
But the bulk of the home owners arrived at their holiday houses to find jetties, trees and lapas missing and their ground floors flooded.
When the waters receded they left rooms filled with bogs of mucus-thick mud.
Boating on the river is near impossible as the shoreline is metres deep in thick sludge and debris too - dashing prospects for owners' upcoming summer holidays.
Entire massive sandbanks have also moved downstream, making navigation of the river perilous. At the 88-unit Riverine housing development, the first of three rows of white-painted thatched houses were all but underwater.
And the famous Malgas pont - believed to be one of the last few man-hauled ponts still in operation - was left dumped and damaged 60m from the river on a road in Malgas.
"We'll be very lucky if it is back in operation by December or even January," one concerned resident said.
At Witsands, residents told of the tons of debris which washed up on to the beaches - including many jetties still intact. Witnesses reported that police had their hands full trying to stop people from making off with valuable timber decking, but that they ultimately fought a losing battle, such was the volume of debris spread over a wide area.
"I wouldn't call it theft, I'd call it opportunism," one resident said. "When does a jetty stop being a jetty and become a pile of wood?"
Many boats could still be seen along the course of the river yesterday and efforts are continuing to retrieve them, residents reported yesterday.
Residents said they believed Santam was the insurer of the bulk of houses in the area - but this could not be confirmed and Santam's head office was not available to report on the extent of claims yesterday.
More than 200 property owners have compiled a gallery of photographs of the damage on the social networking website Facebook.
As far as a possible record water height is concerned, it is understood that the church at Malgas bears markings of the height the river rose to in 1906 - six feet high inside the church.
On that occasion, the water only reached the church steps, but one resident pointed out that there had been no dams upstream then, which held some of the water back a fortnight ago, so there could indeed have been a record amount of water this time.
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