Today I went off to the new Cape Town Stadium for a look see and checkout whats going on in and around the stadium.

Undoubtedly, the roof has to be the most advanced part of Cape Town’s new 68000 seater stadium and has some amazing features. It has been designed to withstand Cape Town’s notorious black south easter’s and the roof can move as much as 1.5m in the wind horizontally. It even comes with earth quake dampners (Cape Town had tremors in 1969 from the Tulbagh earthquake of 6.3). The floating roof is suspended on an inner ring of cable that was lifted by tightening the connecting cables from the outside to the centre ring and it lifted off the ground! Each glass panel weights an average of 95kg and there are 9000 of them!

At its peak there were 3500 people working on it. With construction running 24 hours a day. There are 13000 temporary seats that are going to be done away with afterwards and the area converted into conferencing facilities. Water runoff from the massive glass roof is channeled to a holding dam and then utilised to water the golf course and surrounding areas.

It will have 2 x 75m2 electronic screens from Sony. All the doors, lights, cooling etc are all centrally controlled from the VOC. The stadium has 3×1.5MVA generators to power the whole stadium, no worries about blackouts!

The grass for the stadium is being grown in Milnerton, the steps, seats and most of the concrete was actually formed offsite, transported at 2am and put in place in the early hours of the morning to prevent congestion on Cape Town roads.

We visited the VIP area, the media centre and the changerooms for the new stadium, quite smart!

Early this morning a whole pod of Pilot whales beached themselves on Kommetjie Beach, Cape Town.

The 47 whales that beached themselves are suspected to be following the matriarch who apparently beached first.

We arrived at 11am to assist in getting the whales back into the water, around 10-15 whales had already been returned to the sea by other volunteers but unfortunately some of the already returned whales were re-beaching themselves further down the beach onto rocks, making rescue nearly impossible. It was freezing with the icy north wester coming in straight off the sea.

Disaster Management were trying to sort logistics out to get some of the smaller whales transported to Simonstown, but I couldnt see how they would get it all together. They needed hoists, trucks with padding to prevent the whales moving around and a way to get them onto the navy ships and back off again into the sea. Even this might create too much stress for the whales to handle though.

Update: 31-05-2009
I definitely think that Disaster Management hadnt a clue on how to handle this situation. Clearly there was no scenario planning on how to deal with this type of event. I felt that was the situation on the beach when attending the discussions on what to do.

I felt horrible to be there and not being able to help these clearly very healthy animals – they were strong, a guy fractured his leg when one of the whales tails connected him. Most of the whales were euthanased (ie shot) even though they were strong. It was evident that MCM / Disaster management didnt know how to deal with this disaster.

They would have been able to make a massive difference if they knew how to source whale slings (very similar to horse equipment), padding, trucks for transport to simons town (if needed) and boats that are able to carry this type of whale. Its all possible it just depends on the preplanning and willingness of the relevant authorities.

More photos available at: Beached whales

Call us crazy, but Laura and I are sitting 2k from the finish of todays stage. The people! Everwhere for 14k of the last climb of todays 210km over 3 monster hills, throne we are on is the last. We are so high there is snow very close to us.

Driving through last night from the finish of yesterdays stage took us almost 5hours. People people everywhere!

We rode the climb, hectic 14k of min 10% gradient.

My folks were still at our holiday house and they saw a boomslang.

It then went for a drink of water in the pipe whilst the birds were looking on.

And then it had a standoff with the mongoose! I have never seen or even knew it was possible for a Boomslang to inflate itself.