The roof sheeting from Pick n Pay at the mall was blown off by yesterday morning’s high winds, said James Stewart, project director of the mall’s developers, the Billion Group.

Mall employees said the situation persuaded management to evacuate and temporarily close the centre to shoppers.

This came as the city’s provincial disaster management team geared itself for the huge storm which hit the Western Cape at the weekend.

“We have prepared ourselves for any eventuality,” Buffalo City disaster manager John Fobian said, adding that all sectors of disaster, including the government, was prepared to carry out evacuation and rescue action.

The South African Weather Service warned that the weather would be bitterly cold, wet and windy, with strong gale force winds expected on high ground in the south and west of the Eastern Cape.

The weather service said the strong gale to storm strength winds (in excess of 80km/h) were expected along the Western Cape coast, spreading to East London by late Sunday. “The weather is not conducive for outings, especially for people planning on going out to sea,” said Port Elizabeth weather bureau’s Quinton Jacobs. Media reports described the storm as the biggest to hit the coast in a decade, saying it had left thousands of refugees from the xenophobic attacks earlier this year without shelter and several injured as roofs and tents were blown away.

The storm’s massive waves, caused by a combination of spring tide and a storm surge, and the driving rain caused havoc.

On Sunday afternoon flights leaving Cape Town International airport were grounded, while areas on the West Coast and a number of suburbs including parts of Khayelitsha were suffering from blackouts because of collapsed lines and line faults.

The weather service issued a warning for very rough seas to high seas for Sunday and Monday, and was predicting the wind would gust up to 40 knots on Monday with 8.5m swell, though this was expected to decrease tonight.

Cape Town surf forecaster Steve Pike called the storm that hit Cape Town “a gigantic flame ball of a storm as big as the lower half of Africa” on his surfing website www.wavescape.co.za.

Pike, a former Daily Dispatch journalist, predicted that the swell along the southern and Eastern Cape this week until Thursday would be one of the most powerful long range swells he would ever see.