Inferno on Cape Town’s Table Mountain Rages Out of Control By Paul Vecchiatto and Mike Cohen | April 20, 2021
More than 250 firefighters in Cape Town battled a massive blaze that broke out on the slopes of the city’s Table Mountain on Sunday and spread to a university campus, severely damaging at least three buildings and forcing student residences to be evacuated.
Efforts to extinguish the flames were hampered by howling winds, with helicopters that are usually deployed to douse the flames unable to fly on Monday. Some residents of the suburbs of Vredehoek and Devil’s Peak were instructed to vacate their homes, schools in the area were shut and several streets were closed to traffic.
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“We are basically planning for two-and-a-half more waves,” Sanlam Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Paul Hanratty said by phone. The insurer is also “very realistic” that South Africa’s vaccine program “is not going to impact the current year very significantly,” he said.
Africa’s most-industrialized nation has been the hardest hit by the pandemic on the continent, with an official death toll of over 51,000 and more than 1.5 million infections. It started inoculating health workers in February, but the government’s program may only reach the two-thirds of the population necessary to achieve herd immunity in 12 to 18 months.
With the widest reach across Africa of any insurer, Sanlam is preparing for a doubling in excess claims from surges in Covid-19 infections and the longer-term health effects of the pandemic in coming months.