Cape Town - After a seemingly gradual start to the winter season, Capetonians are now in for harsh winds, heavy rains and chilling temperatures.
According to the SA Weather Service (Saws), Cape Town will this week experience temperatures as low as 11 degrees Celsius throughout the week.
There’s also the chance of rain for at least two days, thunderstorms on Monday and damaging winds.
On its official website, the weather service described how Capetonians might have difficulty in navigation at sea for small vessels and personal water craft like kayaks.
It also revealed that small vessels would be at risk of taking on water and capsizing in the locality.
Meanwhile, for the Western Cape, Saws said residents could expect partly cloudy skies with isolated showers and thundershowers in the extreme north-west, otherwise cloudy and cool to cold with scattered to widespread showers and thundershowers over the central and eastern parts.
“The wind along the coast will be fresh to strong easterly to south-easterly, and the expected UVB sunburn index will be as low as 2 on most days.”
In preparation for the upcoming days, the City of Cape Town’s directorate for urban mobility announced that it would be joining the road infrastructure management (Rim) department teams in Atlantis, Parklands and Joe Slovo Park to oversee some of their clean-up operations.
According to the City, the work being done by the Rim teams includes cleaning catch pits, ponds, pipes and forms part of the directorate’s annual winter preparedness programme to mitigate potential flood risks in Cape Town.
City Mayco member for urban mobility Rob Quintas said: “The Rim department plays a crucial role all year round in maintaining the City’s stormwater assets.
“However, at this time of year the department’s districts and depots across Cape Town finalise their cleaning efforts with the annual winter preparedness programme.
“This programme has been implemented pro-actively over the past 11 months to improve the hydraulic functioning of the stormwater system in preparation for the winter period. This also includes areas prone to flooding or which were identified as hot spots for continuous illegal dumping.
“The cleaning of pipes, catch pits, wet and dry ponds and canals is currently still under way, with the teams completing the remainder of the work over the next six weeks,” Quintas said.