Fri 25 Jun 2021 01.15 EDT
Last modified on Fri 25 Jun 2021 04.11 EDT
The fire that started on the slopes of Table Mountain on April 18 this year quickly swept through the University of Cape Town campus. The world watched in horror as the African Studies Library was burned to the ground. In the weeks that followed, volunteers waded through the waterlogged basement of the razed building to see which rare books had survived.
What few people beyond the university realised at the time is that barely 100 metres away the Department of Biological Sciences had also suffered catastrophic losses. “We’ve lost everything,” says Prof Timm Hoffman, the director of the Plant Conservation Unit (PCU), which was housed in a “highly flammable wooden turret” on the roof of the HW Pearson building.
Additional reporting by Victoria O’Regan
Efforts to contain the out-of-control wildfire that erupted on Table Mountain on Sunday morning at around 8.45 continued throughout the night.
The unforgiving inferno – suspected by the Table Mountain National Park to have been ignited by an unattended vagrant fire – burnt down a restaurant at Rhodes Memorial and damaged multiple buildings at the University of Cape Town (UCT) campus, including the library.
Efforts continue to contain a vegetation fire in the mountain above UCT.
The City of Cape Town is engaging in active firefighting efforts along with TMNP and the Volunteer Wildfire Service.
At this stage, UCT has initiated an evacuation of student residences. #CTNewspic.twitter.com/3qtF6CqcXS
Covered in sandy, nutrient-starved soils, scorched by fire, and pummelled by the prevailing gale-force southeaster in summer, the Cape Floral Kingdom has persisted as a land of extreme paradoxes for millenniums.
Given the harsh conditions that assail life here, this world seems to have every reason not to be a botanical number cruncher’s wet dream: the untrained eye may hardly conceive that it gives refuge to nearly 20% of Africa’s flora on less than 0.5% of the continent’s surface. It seems implausible that some 9 000 plant species should thrive in these coastal extremities, 70% of which live nowhere else on Earth.