Limbe Wildlife Centre

Category: Cameroon, Chimpanzee, Simone de Vries | Date: Jun 14 2009 | By: limbewildlifecentre

Two weeks ago Limbe was taken by surprise when an extremely violent storm hit the coastline. The Limbe Wildlife Centre suffers from a great deal of damage to trees and enclosures. Especially the chimpanzees are badly affected, because there outside enclosure was completely destroyed. It will take a long time and a lot of money to repair all the damage. We really need all the help we can get, so we appreciate all donations. When there is a storm in Europe or America you watch the weather news at night and you get a complete explanation. Here we have no weather (wo)man to confirm that it has been really bad and to give a name to our bad luck. We don’t know if it was a tornado or something like that, but it is clear that it was really bad. The storm did not last very long, 30 minutes at most, but it was very strong. Many people saw there houses destroyed and, while the chimpanzees were inside, their outside enclosure was completely leveled. The fence went down and their favorite shadow tree was uprooted. This is the old chimpanzee enclosure, luckily the new Born Free chimpanzee enclosure suffered only minor damage and has already been fixed.  But with our ever-growing group of chimpanzees, there are 53 now, we still need the old enclosure, so it will have to be completely rebuilt. Storms are normal at the beginning of the raining season, but everybody agrees that something like this is exceptional.Best wishes,Simone