A FLOOD warning has forced production to find a back-up location for I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here!
Days out from the series three launch, producers of the South African-based reality series are on medium alert as the local damn has broken and currently running at 170 cubic litres of water per second.
“We’ve run through the plans in the event of that, and they’re fairly scary,” I’m A Celebrity host Chris Brown told News Corp Australia.
“We sit in a large wooden and steel tree house at the top of the jungle so when lightning starts hitting, we’re quite a large target. Basically, we’ll have to relocate out of our tree house to somewhere safer. It just shows you that we’re in the wilds of Africa and this stuff does happen. It also reinforces that if we’re going through it then our celebrities in camp are as well. It’s an extreme place and extreme places have extreme weather.”
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I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here hosts Dr Chris Brown and Julia Morris take shelter from South African storms. Picture: Supplied/Nigel Wright for Ten.Source:Supplied
It is a very different scenario to last year’s season when the area near Kruger National Park was in severe drought.
If the damn flow reaches 450 cubic litres a second the production will have to be evacuated.
On Wednesday night alone, the area registered 187mm of rain, with a severe storm causing power outages.
“There is little concern that heavy rainfall in camp could lead to flash flooding but there is a contingency that will have celebrities evacuated and relocated to another location,” Ten head of entertainment and factual programming Stephen Tate said.
Snap shot of stormy skies over last year’s I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here camp in South Africa. Picture: Supplied/InstagramSource:Instagram
Production get weather information from the local disaster management team, the local air force base and weather forecasters on a daily basis.
“If we do get heavy rain as predicted then the celebrities better watch out,” Brown added ahead of series three of the reality show premiering on Sunday night. “I think flooding will be the least of their concerns because the water does a lot of things. It tends to get snakes moving, spider’s holes get filled and they’ll often come out and go in search of a new home. And also Tics, and all sorts of bugs, their biggest fear is drying out, so at the moment because there is water around they feel that they can be very active and breed.”
Last year’s contestant Laurina Fleure preparing to jump from a dam wall as crew surround her on I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here. Picture: Supplied/Nigel Wright for Ten.Source:Channel 10
And of course, there are larger African animals like Hippos and crocodiles.
“The more rain there is, the more hippos’ scent gets washed away so they have to go back out and re-establish their territories,” Brown explained. “They’ll often wonder around a lot more and seek out areas they haven’t necessarily been to for a while. That may include our camp.
And we’ve got a resident leopard that the bush boys have said they are still finding tracks from, so if it rains then I’m sure our leopard will be keen to get back out there and leave its scent on a variety of trees, and potentially celebrities.”
*The journalist is in South Africa as a guest of Channel Ten.
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