Rob Erasmus News Today

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 f...

Speaking to Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet unit on Saturday, Rob Erasmus of Enviro Wildfire Services, the park’s independent fire investigator, said the Thursday fire had been started by a homeless person on private property near the park. “The Oudekraal fire investigation has been completed and the person responsible has been identified,” said Erasmus. “It was caused by an unattended vagrant fire,” he added. “The cause of the fire is regarded as accidental negligence. We ha...

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 se...