VACANT CHAIR SHELLHOLENEWS LETTER

October 2016

Morning all, hope you are all fit and well and enjoying the way sunshine, longer days shorter night what a pleasure. It seems as in the past few years we have skipped Spring and gone straight through

to summer. Due to the heat and drought water has become like “gold”, please do not waste this previous commodity, and if you see a leaking pipe report to your nearest Municipality for urgent

attention, we all ride past this water leaks in the streets and hope someone else will report. The more complaints they get the quicker the response. Courtesy of Stuart Howie he has sent an article from

News 24 on water restrictions. Have also included tips on how to save water. Brian and I took part in the Jacaranda Annual Spring walk on the 10th September and completed the

8 kilometers we set out to do and have the medals to prove it.Further on Sunday the 25th September popped around to see Betty and Jimmy Strong at their new home. They both look very well and happy, and have also put on some weight especially Betty,

they have a lovely room with a view of the mountain. Jimmy also mentioned that Karel, Hennie Pienaar,Tracy, Shaun & Ann had also been to see them.

We would like to wish the following persons and anyone that we may have forgotten who celebrate their birthdays in October 2016 a very

OCTOBER BIRTHDAYS

1st MOTH “O”

15th – Stuart Howie

South Africa: Water Restrictions for Tshwane

The City of Tshwane on Tuesday implemented water restrictions as the country continued to deal with the effects of drought.

Infrastructure MMC Darryl Moss told the media that the Department of Water and Sanita-tion had published a notice stating that drawing water from the Integrated Vaal River Sys-tem should be limited.

"The city of Tshwane is therefore obliged to comply with the notice and reduce its water consumption by 25%," Moss said.

"We receive 72% of our bulk water from Rand Water, but we also source 28% of our water from our own treatment plants and boreholes."

Moss further indicated that the limitation for drawing water from the Vaal River System by urban and irrigation users would result in restrictions that include watering/irrigating gar-dens with a hosepipe or sprinkler from 6:00-18:00.

"Washing of vehicles with hosepipes and filling of swimming pools. The same restrictions which were implemented last year will apply with immediate effect from today.

"We urge all our consumers to join us in making efforts to reduce the water consumption," he said.

Moss added that failure to adhere to the restrictions would result in the City taking drastic steps to enforce compliance.

"Should consumers not adhere to the restrictions as imposed by the department, as well as Rand Water, then the situation will get worse and consumers will be without water for longer periods. Furthermore, if the situation does not improve then the City will be forced to introduce increased tariffs, increased policing and water shedding," said Moss.

He added that they have the powers to impose fines on those found to be going against the call for using water sparingly, but that would be last resort.

"if we don't reach our targets then we will impose punitive measures," he said.

Here are some great tips on how to save water at home:

Only water your garden after the sun has set and when it is absolutely necessary. Watering your plants during the day means that most of it will evaporate, wasting water. According the Department of Water and Sanitation, up to 90% of the water evaporates when watering your gar-den between 10:00 and 15:00. Another great option in this regard is us-ing grey water – the water from your tub for example – for irrigation.

Make sure that all your taps and pipes are in tiptop shape. Plumbers can help you out with this, replacing washers and fixtures where and when necessary. Though this might have an initial cost, you will be able to save in the long run.

According to Mail & Guardian, Eskom uses about 3% of our water. This means that by reducing your electricity consumption, you may be able to reduce Eskom’s water consumption.

Shower instead of taking a bath. According to the Department of Water and Sanitation, one minute of showering can use up to 20 litres of water (so keep them as short as possible) while a bath can use between 80 and 150 litres of water.

If you want to make an investment towards water saving in the home, call in professional plumbers and implement duel-flush toilet mecha-nisms and low-flow shower heads. When replacing washing machines and dishwasher, make sure that they are water efficient.

Flushing the toilet unnecessarily is also a waste of water as it can use up to 12 litres per flush. Tissues, cotton wool and things of this nature can be disposed of in the trashcan instead.

Collect rain water. Though we realise there isn’t much of that in large parts of South Africa lately, finding JoJo tanks for sale and collecting rain water can aid you in times like this, giving you a water source to water your garden and even wash your car.

Another stunning tip is to insulate your hot water pipes, allowing that not too much water is wasted waiting for it to warm up.

Put a brick in your toilet and leave it to mellow. Toilets use more water than is necessary, and flushing can be unnecessary. A brick will sub-stantially reduce water use.  

Shorten showers and teeth brushing, while staying away from bathing. Turn the tap off while lathering and brushing. 

Don’t refill the swimming pool. These are a luxury and a waste of water when entire communities are faced with trying to live without water. Savings in one place mean people get water elsewhere.

The most critical component of water saving is for South Africa to live like it is a water scarce country. Water is the single biggest constraint to development

Other simple ways to save water is to close the tap when washing your face and brushing your teeth. Use a bucket instead if hosepipe if you have to wash your car and, hold off as long as you can before filling your pool.

7 Things You Should Know About Mount EverestMay 29, 2013 By Jesse Greenspan

o Author

Jesse Greenspan

On May 29, 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay completed the first con-firmed ascent of Mount Everest, which stands 29,035 feet above sea level. Though the two mountaineers spent only about 15 minutes on the snow-cov-ered summit, they managed to snap a few photos, share a celebratory hug and eat a bar of mint cake—an early version of today’s energy bars. Tenzing, a Nepalese Sherpa, also left some of the sweets as a Buddhist offering, and Hillary, a beekeeper from New Zealand, placed a cross nearby. On the 60th an-niversary of their widely celebrated feat, which Hillary described as knocking “the bastard off,” here are seven things you may not know about Earth’s high-est mountain.

1. No one knew of Everest as the roof of the world until the 19th cen-tury.In 1802, the British launched what became known as the Great Trigonometrical

Survey in order to map the Indian subcontinent. Heavy equipment, rugged ter-rain, monsoons, malaria and scorpions made the work exceedingly difficult. Nonetheless, the surveyors were able to take astonishingly accurate measure-ments. They soon proved that the Himalayas—and not the Andes, as previously believed—were the world’s highest mountain range. By 1852, they had fin-gered Everest, then called Peak XV, as the king of them all, and by 1856 they had calculated its height as 29,002 feet above sea level. A 1999 survey using state-of-the-art GPS technology found them off by only 33 feet.

2. Hillary and Tenzing might have been beat to the summit.George Mallory, a British schoolteacher, participated in the first three docu-mented attempts to scale Mount Everest from 1921 to 1924. Before the last of those expeditions, he wrote, “It is almost unthinkable…that I shan’t get to the top; I can’t see myself coming down defeated.” On June 4, 1924, a teammate made it within about 900 vertical feet of the summit before turning back. Mal-lory and climbing partner Andrew Irvine then made their own attempt for glory. They departed the 26,800-foot Camp VI on June 8 and were last seen that af-ternoon trudging upwards in their tweed coats, hobnailed boots and other prim-itive apparel. Some people believe that Mallory and Irvine reached the summit before dying on the way down. A camera they supposedly carried could per-haps solve the mystery, but it was not among the items in Mallory’s pockets when his corpse finally was discovered in 1999. Irvine’s body remains unfound.

3. Tenzing had almost reached the top once before.After Mallory’s death, the next 10 or so expeditions to Mount Everest also failed. Tenzing gained valuable experience participating in six of them, starting off as a porter and later progressing into a full team member. In 1952 he and a Swiss climber came within about 800 vertical feet of the top—likely higher than anyone had ever gone. He broke his own record the next year by reaching the summit with Hillary. Since then, around 4,000 other mountaineers have like-wise climbed Everest, including Hillary’s son and one of Tenzing’s sons.

4. Corpses are often left behind when a climber dies en route.About 240 people have died attempting to climb Mount Everest. Avalanches, rockslides, blizzards, falls, altitude sickness, freezing temperatures, exhaustion and combinations thereof have all proven fatal, particularly in the so-called “death zone” above 26,000 feet. Since getting them down is grueling and dan-gerous, most of the corpses remain up there. They are well preserved in the snow and apparently serve as trail markers for climbers who pass by. Everest’s deadliest day occurred in May 1996, when eight people perished in a storm. Yet that incident, made famous by Jon Krakauer’s book “Into Thin Air,” did nothing to stem the tide of people willing to shell out tens of thousands of dol-lars for a chance to tame Earth’s highest mountain. Traffic jams have even been reported near the top, and a fistfight broke out this April between three European climbers and more than 100 Sherpas, over what the guides deemed to be rude and dangerous behavior during an attempted ascent. Meanwhile, the deaths keep coming, including at least 10 last year and around eight this year.

5. Everest’s litter problem goes well beyond cadavers.As early as 1963, a climber wrote in National Geographic that parts of Mount Everest had become “the highest junkyard on the face of the Earth.” Empty oxygen bottles, human excrement, food packaging, broken climbing gear and torn tents continue to spoil the environment there. A single cleanup in spring 2011 removed over 8 tons of trash from Everest, and many more tons remain uncollected. In order to counteract the problem, Nepal’s government now re-quires climbers to bring back all of their equipment or risk losing a $4,000 de-posit. New trash bins and a waste incinerator have also recently been installed near the mountain.

6. Few animals venture into Everest’s upper reaches.Sagarmatha National Park, which includes Mount Everest and surrounding peaks, supports a variety of mammals at its lower elevations, from snow leop-ards and musk deer to red pandas and Himalayan tahr. About 150 bird species also reside within the park. Almost no wildlife, however, is found above 20,000 feet, the point at which permanent snow prevents even the hardiest lichens and mosses from growing. Among the exceptions are Himalayan jumping spi-ders, which have been observed as high as 22,000 feet, where they eat insects blown up by the wind; yellow-billed choughs, a crow-like bird, which have fol-lowed mountaineers up to about 26,500 feet; and bar-headed geese, which mi-grate over Mount Everest on their way from the Tibetan Plateau to India’s marshes.

7. Everest is the highest point from sea level, but other mountains are taller.Mauna Kea, a volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island, tops out at 13,796 feet above sea level. But because it rises from the ocean floor, its base-to-summit height is ac-tually more than 33,000 feet, making it, by that measurement at least, the tallest mountain in the world. Nor is Everest the closest to outer space. Be-cause Earth isn’t a perfect sphere—it bulges at the middle—that honor belongs to 20,561-foot Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador.

Mount Everest: World's Highest MountainBy Kim Ann Zimmermann, Live Science Contributor | September 20, 2012 05:30pm ET Reaching 29,029 feet (8,848 meters) above sea level, Mount Everest is the highest mountain on Earth. Located in the Mahalangur section of the Himalayas, the mountain's summit straddles the border separating China and Nepal.The mountain's height was first determined in 1856. The Great Trigonometric Survey of British India pegged the mountain, known to them as Peak XV, at 29,002 feet (8,840 meters). But those surveyors were at a disadvantage because Nepal would not grant them entry due to concerns that the country would be invaded or annexed. The current accepted elevation was determined by an Indian survey in 1955 and backed up by a 1975 Chinese measurement.

Lit by the sun, Everest's northeast ridge, the place George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were last seen alive.Credit: John L. Semple. In 1865, Andrew Waugh, the British Surveyor General of India, suggested that the mountain be named after his predecessor in the job, Sir George Everest. The Tibetans had referred to the mountain as "Chomolungma," or Holy Mother, for centuries, but Waugh did not know this because Nepal and Tibet were closed to outsiders.Climbing Mount EverestMount Everest attracts experienced mountaineers as well as less-seasoned climbers who typically enlist guides known as sherpas. Climbing more than 8,000 feet is no easy feat. Altitude sickness, weather and wind are the major roadblocks to making the summit for most climbers. More than 5,000 people have climbed Everest and 219 have died trying. About 77 percent of those ascents have been accomplished since 2000. In 2007, a record number of 633 ascents were recorded.Mount Everest has two main climbing routes, the southeast ridge from Nepal and the north ridge from Tibet. Today, the southeast ridge route, which is technically easier, is more frequently used.The northern approach was discovered in 1921 by George Mallory during the British Reconnaissance Expedition, which was an exploratory expedition, not intended to attempt the summit. Mallory was famously, perhaps apocryphally, quoted as answering the question "Why do you want to climb Mount Everest?" with the reply "Because it's there."In 1922, Brit George Finch attempted an ascent using oxygen for the first time, but the expedition was thwarted by an avalanche.In June 1924, Mallory and Andrew Irvine did not survive their attempt to reach to the summit. A 1999 expedition found Mallory's body.Early expeditions in the 1920s and 1930s attempted to make the ascent from the Tibetan side but access was closed after Tibet came under Chinese control in 1950. This spurred Bill Tilman and a small party that included Charles Houston, Oscar Houston and Betsy Cowles, to approach Everest through Nepal along the route that has developed into the standard approach to Everest from the south.In 1952, members of a Swiss expedition led by Edouard Wyss-Dunant, were able to reach a height of about 28,199 feet (8,595 meters) on the southeast ridge, setting a new climbing altitude record. Tenzing Norgay, a member of this expedition and a Nepali sherpa, took part in the British expedition the following year.In 1953, a British expedition led by John Hunt, returned to Nepal. Hunt selected two climbing pairs to attempt to reach the summit. The first pair (Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans) came within 300 feet (100 meters) of the summit but were turned back due to oxygen problems. Two days later, the second pair, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, reached the summit, took some pictures and left some sweets and a cross.Life on EverestMount Everest is surrounded by a number of substantial peaks, including Lhotse, (27,940 feet/8,516 meters); Nuptse, (25,771 feet/7,855 meters); and Changtobse, (24,870 feet/7,580 meters).Those higher altitudes cannot support animal life or vegetation; however, birch, juniper, blue pines, firs, bamboo and rhododendron grow in the lower areas. There are no plants above 18,690 feet (5,750 meters).Musk deer, wild yak, red panda, snow leopard and Himalayan black bears inhabit lower altitudes. There are also small numbers of Himalayan thars, deer, langur monkeys, hares, mountain foxes, martens, and Himalayan wolves.

Mountain milestonesOther milestones among Mount Everest expeditions include:

May 20, 1965: Sherpa Nawang Gombu becomes the first person to reach the summit twice.

May 16, 1975: Junko Tabei of Japan becomes the first woman to summit Everest.

May 3, 1980: Japanese climber Yasuo Kato is the first non-Sherpa to reach the summit a sec-ond time, following his original 1973 summit.

Aug. 20, 1980: Reinhold Messner is the first person to reach the summit solo.

1996 climbing season: 16 people die while climbing on Mount Everest, the highest number of fatalities in a single year. Eight climbers die on May 10 during a storm. One of the sur-vivors, Jon Krakauer, a journalist on assignment for "Outside" magazine, wrote the best-seller "Into Thin Air" about his experience.

May 22, 2010: Apa Sherpa, who first summitted on May 10, 1990, reaches the summit a 20th time.

— Kim Ann Zimmermann, LiveScience Contributor

Amazing facts about Mount Everest

29 May 2013

It's 60 years since the first successful climb to the top of Everest but how much do you know about the world's tallest mountain?

1. In 1953, climber Edmund Hillary from New Zealand and Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay became the first people to reach the summit of Everest.

2. The mountain sits in the Himalayas in Nepal and is 8,848 metres tall - that's around the height at which passenger planes fly.

3. If that doesn't sound that high to you - imagine 643 double-decker buses stacked on top of each other - that's how high the summit is!

4. Around 3,000 people have successfully climbed Mount Everest but 210 people have died during or after climbing the mountain.

5. In 2012, around 240 people reached the summit every day.

6. Although it's the world's highest mountain, it can get crowded. People have reported having to wait in queues to climb certain parts.

7. In May this year, 80-year-old Yuichiro Miura from Japan, became the oldest man to climb Everest.

8. Jordan Romero, from the US became the youngest person to climb Everest aged 13, in 2010.

9. In 1975 Japanese climber Junko Tabei became the first woman to climb Everest. 18 years later Re-becca Stephens, on the right of the picture, became the first British woman to reach the summit.

10. Climbing Everest doesn't come cheap: it can cost around £50,000 to climb to the summit.

At 8848 m (29029 ft), Mt Everest is the highest mountain in the world.

Mt Everest is located in the Himalayas mountain range on the border of Nepal and Tibet (China).

In 1865, The Royal Geographical Society gave Mt Everest its English name in honour of George Everest, a Welsh surveyor who was the British Surveyor General of India from 1830 to 1843. The mountain has other names in languages such as Nepali and Tibetan.

The height of Mt Everest was first published in 1856, when it was known as Peak XV.

In 1953 the first successful ascent to the summit of Mt Everest was achieved by New Zealander Ed-mund Hillary and Nepali Sherpa Tenzing Norgay.

There are two main climbing routes and many others that are less frequently used. Since the first successful ascent in 1953, thousands have climbed to the summit of Mt Everest, hundreds have also died while attempting to do so.

Dangers that await climbers on Mt Everest include high winds, bad weather and altitude sickness.

In recent times the number of climbers attempting to reach the summit of Mt Everest has increased dramatically, causing concerns for both safety and the state of the mountain as climbers routinely leave litter, gear and other debris behind.

There is a South Base Camp located at 5364 m (17598 ft) and a North Base Camp located at 5150 m (16900 ft). Supplies are taken to these base camps and climbers will often stay there while acclima-tizing to the high altitude and lower levels of oxygen.

Altitudes above 8000 m (26000 ft) are often referred to as the "Death Zone", a height that humans struggle to survive at for more than a few days.

Plants and animals struggle to survive under the extreme conditions of Mt Everest but birds have been seen at high altitudes and a type of moss grows at heights close to 6500 m (21325 ft).

Although Mt Everest is the highest mountain on Earth above sea level, its summit is only the 5th far-thest from the Earth's center. Because the Earth bulges at the equator, mountains such as Mt Chimbo-razo in Ecuador have summits that are farther away.

Q u i c k Fa c t s a b o u t M o u n t a i n s Mountains make up about one-fifth of the world's landscape, and provide homes to at least one-tenth of the world's people.

Heights of mountains are generally given as heights above sea level.

The world's highest peak on land is Mount Everest in the Himalayas. It is 8,850.1728 m (29,036 ft) tall.

Ben Nevis is also the highest mountain in Great Britain.

The tallest known mountain in the solar system is Olympus Mons, located on Mars.

There are mountains under the surface of the sea!

Mountains occur more often in oceans than on land; some islands are the peaks of mountains coming out of the water.

About 80 per cent of our planet's fresh water originates in the mountains.

All mountain ecosystems have one major characteristic in common - rapid changes in altitude, climate, soil, and vegetation over very short distances.

Plants that may be found on mountains include conifers, oak, chestnut, maple, junipers, stonecrops, campions, mosses, ferns and climbers.

The highest 14 mountains in the world are all found in the Himalayas

In some mountainous areas the rivers are permanently frozen. These are called glaciers.

JOKE

A farmer drove to a neighbour’s farmhouse and knocked on the door. A boy of 9 openedit. “Is your Mum or Dad home?” asks the farmer. “No they went to town” says the boy.“How about your brother Howard, is he here?” “No he went with”. The farmer stoodshifting from one foot to the other. The boy said “I know where the tools are if you wantto borrow one or I can give Dad a message” says the boy. Well said the farmer lookinguncomfortable, “I really want to talk to your Dad about your brother Howard getting mydaughter Suzy pregnant”. The boy thought for a minute and said, “Well I know me Dadcharges R1000 for the bull and R500 for the boar, but I don’t know how much he chargesfor Howard”

.

Compiled by Lynne Salter