Hayibo.com - Report says Fish Hoek to be submerged by climate change, SA celebrates

Report says Fish Hoek to be submerged by climate change, SA celebrates

CAPE TOWN. A report published this week has outlined in detail how rising sea levels will completely obliterate the coastal suburb of Fish Hoek on the Cape Peninsula. The news has been welcomed by South Africans, who have long been embarrassed by Fish Hoek's international status as one of the planet's five most depressing towns.

According to the report, the face-brick Tuscan duplexes, dead lawns and golf-ball letterboxes of the faded resort town could be under water by as early as 2050.

However for most South Africans this is not soon enough.

Fish Hoek has been dogged by controversy since its founding in 1926 as a halfway house for the widows and orphans of indigent racists, and despite a decade of growth in South Africa, the town's economy remains depressed.

75 percent of residents are reliant on the region's scrap-booking industry, while the remaining 25 percent depend on cash sent home by family members who have emigrated to Cape Town and Johannesburg.

Public sentiment also turned sharply against the community in 2002 when it was chosen by the World Heritage Foundation as one of the five towns most likely to cause overnight visitors to commit suicide before dawn.

Since then it has never left the top five, and last year it was ranked third behind Las Vegas and Baghdad, with the UK's Brighton in fourth place.

The authors of the report on climate change said that their research "was probably bad news for Brighton".

"There's been almost nothing to separate Fish Hoek and Brighton since 2002," said researcher Karl Adenauer. "Both have that end-of-summer, ice-cream-cone-dropped-on-concrete, covered-in-flies vibe.

"But with Fish Hoek set to be wiped off the map, Brighton needs to be prepared to be the third-shittiest place in the world."

Fish Hoek and Brighton also tied in first place in a 2004 international survey in which respondents were asked to name the town in which one was most likely to see an elderly couple, wearing pyjamas, sitting on a concrete bench in light drizzle, sharing a portion of cold fish and chips, while holding hands and ruminating on their onrushing deaths.

Fish Hoek's town council said it was preparing a statement, which would be sung, accompanied by local youth pastors playing a Casio keyboard, a guitar and a tambourine.