HAMNET Report 14th July 2024

Over last weekend, Tropical Cyclone BERYL, which had weakened as it drifted west-north-west towards Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, changed its mind, turned sharp right and swept across about 50 of Texas’ lower counties. A state of disaster in that half of Texas was declared last Friday, as the storm brought the potential for damaging winds, heavy rainfall and a storm surge that could push waters up by a couple of metres along the Texas coastline.

The Global Disaster Alert and Coordination Centre (GDACS) summarizes the final statistics arising from the hurricane as including 28 fatalities in various countries and many thousands of affected or displaced persons. What was unusual about Beryl was how early in the hurricane season such a severe storm arose, and how quickly it transformed from a storm warning to a stage 5 hurricane. I hope this is not a forewarning of things to come this season.

In other parts of the US, extreme temperatures were being measured. In Arizona’s Death Valley, the record for the highest temperature ever recorded there was broken this week, at a touch over 53 degrees Celsius! And apparently some people were foolish enough to congregate there just to be able to experience the heat, in the knowledge that their vehicles might overheat, and blow a head gasket, trapping them in the life-threatening temperatures. There doesn’t appear to be any medication for madness!

Meanwhile, the South African weather services were warning of a series of cold fronts, striking the south western Cape coastline in quick succession, and bringing heavy rains, very strong winds, and flooding to low-lying areas.

And, as you have most probably seen, the Municipality of Cape Town, plus Stellenbosch and Overberg municipalities were devastated by huge amounts of rainfall, of the order of 200-300 mm of rain between last Sunday the 7th and today. Masses of homes were flooded, families had to be evacuated away to dry community halls and rescue centres, roads and embankments were washed away, trees were uprooted, and infrastructure like clean water supply and electricity devastated.

It is not over yet. Another 40mm of rain is forecast between today and the end of this coming week, before the cloud and precipitation leaves us. I don’t think the Western Cape experiences those flash-flood type storms that strike the border areas with Mozambique and in KZN for example. We don’t experience such loss of life, but the effect of the weather and the very cold winter months make surviving in a wet home, with nothing dry to keep warm under, or even wear, very unpleasant, and contribute to a different type of disaster that takes many weeks to recover from.

Unfortunately the citizens in the areas who suffer the most are the informal dwellers, who have to be content with self-built non-waterproof shacks on low-lying ground, and it doesn’t take more than a rise of 50cm in the water table to flood all the dwellings. Disaster Management Agencies in the province run round in circles, helping in area after area, just in time for the next cold front to strike, and the next informal settlement to be flooded.

We hope to see the end to this rash of cold fronts during the course of the coming week. Of course, maximum temperatures don’t get much above 14 degrees, and humidity remains in the 80 to 90 percent range, so nothing dries, even though it is not raining. Very dismal indeed.

HAMNET Western Cape has been on standby, and nets on HF have continued, to make sure that outlying hams are safe, and also to make sure message traffic can be passed if areas get cut off. So far, we have not been needed. Luckily, in this weather, people are not foolish enough to try hiking up Table Mountain, so searches and rescues have been down to the minimum. The Table Mountain Cable Car system is not running anyway, as it undergoes its annual maintenance in July, so people realize that if they walk up Table Mountain, they’re jolly well going to have to walk down again, and a slippery mountain is a treacherous mountain!

The cold Antarctic air that always comes in after a major cold front in the Western Cape, is responsible for snow alerts for the Western, Northern and Eastern Cape, and Free State, as well as very cold conditions in the northern Provinces, as well as for the strong winds and veld fire warnings in KZN, which has their disaster management agencies also on high alert.

Meanwhile, Dr Imtiaaz Sooliman, of “Gift of the Givers” has repeated his call for a single organization countrywide to manage disasters. He says that, with disaster management on many tiers in each province, and often on different tiers in each province, it becomes very difficult to know how best to respond, and who to approach for the right kind of governmental response, or disaster funding in each province. Things are too fragmented, he says.

Often he has wondered “who is in charge?”, and notes that with many agencies with varying degrees of capability, it is easy for responsibility to be passed on to someone else, thereby shifting “blame” when reactions to disasters are being orchestrated.

The ARRL has distributed a paragraph saying that, at Ham Radio 2024, the International amateur radio exhibition, last week in Friedrichshafen, Germany, the Software Defined Radio Academy (SDRA) celebrated its 10-year anniversary. Founded in 2014, the SDRA has become a new platform for the exchange of knowledge surrounding software defined radio. In the early years, the academy’s lectures were recorded with primitive camera technology, but today a video team takes the recordings to a completely different level. The SDRA’s YouTube channel now has 150 uploads, 4850 subscribers, and many more views of the videos.

This is Dave Reece ZS1DFR reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.