Johannesburg residents wake up to rare snowfall

A rare snowfall dusted Johannesburg and other high-lying parts of South Africa on Monday, with weather services warning of potential road closures and dangerously cold temperatures.

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Residents in the business hub woke up to snowfalls lightly covering rooftops and gardens as a cold front that hit the country late last week morphed into a weather system called a “cutoff low.”

At a Johannesburg kindergarten, excited children made snowballs and attempted to catch flakes with their tongues — some having never witnessed snow before.

“We last saw this type of weather in 2012,” Puseletso Mofokeng, a senior forecaster at the South African Weather Service (SAWS), told AFP.

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SNOWFALL

Mofokeng said snow was reported across southern parts of Johannesburg’s Gauteng province and was expected to continue falling throughout the day, also hitting high-lying areas of the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces.

“Roads may be closed,” he said.

Johannesburg lies at an altitude of more than 1,700 metres (5,600 feet) and is in the peak of the southern hemisphere winter.

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But snow in the city remains a rare event — prior to 2012, heavy snowfall occurred in 1996, Mofokeng said.

“It’s been such a long time, I feel so happy,” said Lerato Matepese, a Johannesburg resident.

SAWS warned that icy temperatures posed a risk to street dwellers in a country where poverty remains widespread.

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Rough seas and strong winds were also expected to create hazardous conditions for small vessels off South Africa’s eastern coast.

ub/sn/ri

© Agence France-Presse