Public and most private schools across the City of Cape Town and the wider Western Cape reopened on Wednesday after a multi-day cold-front storm system that closed schools, flooded informal settlements and damaged infrastructure across the province since Sunday. The Western Cape Education Department announced the reopening at 7am after consultation with the South African Weather Service confirmed an end to the most severe band of weather.
The storm system — a sequence of three cold fronts arriving in 36-hour intervals from Sunday evening — produced sustained gale-force winds and rainfall accumulations in excess of 150mm in parts of the Cape Peninsula. The South African Weather Service confirmed three weather-related deaths over the system's run: a man electrocuted by a downed power line in Khayelitsha, a woman killed by a falling tree in Hout Bay, and a fisherman lost off Kalk Bay whose body was recovered on Tuesday afternoon.
The City of Cape Town's disaster-risk management centre fielded approximately 4,200 service calls between Sunday afternoon and Wednesday morning. Flooding was concentrated in informal settlements including Khayelitsha (sections Island, Makhaza and Monwabisi), Imizamo Yethu, Nomzamo, Lwandle, Phola Park, Gugulethu, Valhalla Park, Vygieskraal, Tafelsig, Delft and Kampies. The City estimated that approximately 6,500 households experienced storm-related water damage.
Power restoration has been the dominant operational challenge. City Power Cape Town and Eskom reported a combined peak of 287 simultaneous outages on Monday afternoon, the largest in three years; the figure had dropped to 38 by Wednesday morning. Restoration crews continued working through the night across the metro south and Helderberg.
Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, briefing reporters at the City's disaster centre in Goodwood on Wednesday morning, said the immediate response had been "well coordinated" but acknowledged that the recurring flooding of informal-settlement sites pointed to "structural infrastructure under-investment" that the City had committed to address in the 2026-27 budget. The City's revised stormwater capital programme will be tabled at council in late May.
The forecast for the rest of the week is benign. The South African Weather Service expects sunny conditions across the Cape Peninsula through Friday, with temperatures climbing to 22 °C on Thursday. A fresh cold front is currently projected to make landfall on Sunday evening but is forecast to be substantially less intense than the system that closed the schools.
The economic toll is still being calculated. Western Cape Premier Alan Winde, in a Wednesday morning statement, said preliminary estimates of provincial damage were "in the high tens of millions of rand" and that a formal request for national-level disaster funding would follow once the assessment had concluded. The provincial agriculture department reported localised losses to wheat and apple plantings in the Overberg.