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El Nino causes Zimbabwe to experience the highest temperatures in 60 years!
Saturday, December 12, 2015 3:44
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Article from: The Zimbabwe Mail
(Written by: Brezhnev Malaba)
HARARE – A punishing heatwave is wreaking havoc in Zimbabwe, giving airline pilots a torrid time and literally sapping the energy out of a country that has seen its hydro-electric reservoir evaporate in the scorching heat.
As the El Niño phenomenon unleashes its fury, the Harare-based Meteorological Services Department says Zimbabwe is experiencing the highest temperatures in 60 years.
With millions of families now at risk of starvation and large numbers of cattle perishing in a frightening drought, a sullen-faced President Robert Mugabe told the ongoing Zanu-PF conference: “We continue to pray for more rain.”
On November 13, a 50-seater Air Zimbabwe turboprop travelling from Harare to Kariba failed to land as the mercury shot beyond 43°C.
The captain concluded it was too dangerous to touch down, considering the high likelihood of engine malfunction and the aircraft tyres bursting upon contact with the blazing asphalt.
Aborting the landing, the pilots flew instead to Victoria Falls International Airport, 500 kilometres away, where they waited for the temperatures to cool down.
Airline manager Chris Kwenda said climate change could soon force them to change flight schedules. Mike Tapfuma Moyo, a private pilot who flies in Africa and the Middle East, told African Independent that high temperatures make flying tricky. “At the best of times, landing an aircraft is no easy task. It takes skill, concentration and often nerves of steel. In the aviation industry, there’s a reason why we say take-off and landing are the most dangerous segments of a flight,” Moyo said.
All over the country, desperate Zimbabweans are gazing forlornly into the cloudless sky and it has dawned on everyone that climate change is no longer a dismissable mantra peddled by fringe scientists but a real danger to livelihoods.
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http://news-uncensored-fresh.blogspot.be/2015/12/el-nino-causes-zimbabwe-to-experience.html
