Simon's Town Civic We Care

May 13th, 2009 by Johan Horak

ALIENS! FIRE! ALIENS! FIRE! ALIENS! FIRE! ALIENS!

The Cape Peninsula is blessed by a spectacular mountain mass that drops in rugged splendour towards the surrounding waters of the Atlantic and False Bay coasts. This is our main claim to be “the Fairest Cape in all the World”. However this blessing instantly turns into a terrible curse, whenever a single spark ignites the tangled masses of alien vegetation that indifference and lack of foresight have allowed to replace so much of our indigenous mountain flora.

The situation has never been worse – everywhere we look, we see thickets of invasive vegetation encroaching right into our suburbs, tangles of vegetation choking road verges and rampant alien plants overhanging our roads and fences. The City authorities, the Province, the Navy, SANParks and a host of private landowners and land speculators all have the legal responsibility and obligations to remove this threat. But what are they doing? – Virtually nothing!

BE AFRAID – BE VERY AFRAID! Unless something is done to sort out this problem, one day a howling South-Easter is going to sweep an unstoppable raging fire storm right through the middle of one of our sleepy suburbs, with huge loss of property and even human life! This happened, on a limited scale last year in Scarborough and at the Red Hill informal settlement. California is now burning and on TV earlier this year, we saw horrific scenes of devastation in Australia, as fires took out whole towns. There were around 200 dead!

Don’t fool yourself – the next major fire disaster could be right here in the South Peninsula. THINK! – Your neighbour’s overgrown plot could be the cause of you losing your home and even your entire family in a runaway fire! So what are you going to do about it?

Its funny – somehow the authorities can always find the money for the high profile task of fire fighting - and thank God they do manage to send in hosts of fire engines, expensive helicopters and hordes of fire fighters, whenever there is a fire. They do a great job. But why are they always pleading an almost total lack of budget, as an excuse for neglecting the less sexy but cost effective task of fire prevention! The logic is skewed – without the Alien vegetation, the fires would be less frequent, not so hot and far easier to control and thus, fire fighting costs would be far less.

We have to act as a community, to call to task the City of Cape Town, who have the actual responsibility of enforcing the bylaws and making the suburbs and urban edge safe from fires. We must demand that they do the job we pay them for and insist that they : –

a) Clear their own land, including highway road reserves, suburban road verges, firebreaks, servitudes and other areas under their direct control. And most important – maintain their land, once cleared.

b) Prosecute any intransigent land owners, who allow their land to be overrun with invasive plants (whoever they are). In Glencairn through the neighbourhood watch, surveys have been made of overgrown plots and these have been submitted to the Council, who have reacted quickly and served notices on the owners. Already we are seeing positive results as some overgrown erfs have now been cleared.

All of us, as individuals, and through our community organisations, such as the STCA, Neighbourhood Watches and ratepayers associations should be writing to our City Councillors and to the new Provincial Representatives and DEMAND ACTION FROM THEM NOW!

To help communities and individuals understand the issues and to identify the most common invasive alien plant species we have set up the web site CAPE OF FIRE which you can reach by clicking the link shown below : -

www.southerncrossroads.info/community/cape-of-fire.php

The purpose of the CAPE OF FIRE website is to examine the link between runaway brush fires and invasive alien plants in the South Peninsula and to explore what can be done to break this link, while providing practical reference information and news to communities and individuals on the control of invasive alien vegetation and best advice on how to protect their homes from the scourge of brush fires. The blog on this web site is updated regularly with the latest news on aliens and fires.

Steve Coe – May 2009