CAPE TOWN'S TINDERBOX

Khayelitsha's TR section has more fires than any other residential area in the metropole

by FARREN COLLINS

A badly burnt Sajimi Siphumle stands in one of the narrow, sandy passageways that separate most of the 3300 households in TR Section in Khayelitsha. The informal settlement with its population of under 9000 residents experiences a residential fire every 1.6 days.
It is part of a greater problem in the the City of Cape Town municipality, where the number of residential fires has increased from 2294 to 2878 between 2009 and 2015, up by 25.5% for that period. Moving gingerly and speaking slowly Siphumle recalls what he can of the night in late March when he and his neighbour lost everything in a fire. His neighbour, 27 year old Sinvuyo Qwalana stands next to the remains of a scorched couch, clutching her brother's infant child.
Siphumle was asleep when a fire raged through his shack, destroying everything inside and mutilating parts of his body. Flames from the blaze leaped across the half-a-metre gap between his shack and his neighbour’s, engulfing the adjacent structure with the same devastating effect to its contents, before both fires were put out by neighbours.
They are just two of the many families likely to be affected by fires in TR Section this year. The relatively small township situated just off the N2, about 25kms outside of the Cape Town CBD, can only be described as a tinderbox, in a city where fires wreak havoc in informal settlements annually.

Since 2009, TR Section has averaged 233 residential fires each year, making it Cape Town's worst affected suburb by some distance. For the past seven years, 1634 residential fires have been recorded in TR Section according to data collected by the City's Disaster Risk Management. In the same period, the second worst affected suburb of Gugulethu had 944 incidences.
“It's not even two days or three days and a shack [burns] down,” Qwalana said. “No matter where you go in TR Section you will hear the same story - that shacks are burning all the time.”
Qwalana is correct. A trip to numerous corners of the township, which is boxed in by a main road on one side and an empty, dry piece of veld, much larger than the township on the other, displays evidence of countless shack walls licked by flames. Throughout people are rebuilding, and along the main road a newly-erected shack stands next to the rubble remains, where a brick house recently stood.
“This is where we lived,” 20 year old Asavela Ntsinde explains pointing to the rubble. “We had an upholstery business running here, it was a workshop where we made sofas.”
The main road along the length of TR Section is lined with furniture and upholstery repair and sales businesses.
“It burned down in February and the [City] only gave us enough material to rebuild one house for the whole family. The house next door, where an old woman and two children lived, burned down too. And a third house was destroyed when (one of the walls of) our brick house fell over on top of it because of damage from the fire.”
The causes of the fires at Ntsinde's and Siphumle's homes are still unknown, but the problem of residential fires in Cape Town's informal settlements remains famed.

Patricia Zweig from the Research Alliance for Disaster and Risk Reduction at the University of Stellenbosch said the use of candles and paraffin stoves, as well as poor and illegal electrical connections are among the main causes of informal residential fires, but they are not the only reasons.
“[In many informal settlements] the problem is obviously one of density and lack of adequate water sources to put out fires on site,” Zweig said. “We would need supersonic speed fire engines to respond fast enough to an informal settlement fi
re. A shack can burn down in less than a minute.” Spokesman for the City's Disaster Risk Management Theo Layne, added that the reasons for the fires at TR Section were not very different to those of other informal settlements.
The City of Cape Town's Fire and Rescue Services said there was often negligence around the use of open fires in informal settlements. “We use a system of nearest station or vehicle, to any incident, is dispatched as soon as the call is received,” said Layne.
“There are thirty fire stations in the City that have to deal with an average of 60 (Winter) to 130 (Summer) incidents daily.”
But for people like Ntsinde who were forced to rebuild and then live in the same proximity of the threat that had already taken away so much, more needed to be done.
“What they could do is set out hose pipes to make it easier for us,” he said. “We could put out the fires ourselves instead of waiting on the fire fighters. As soon as the fire grows you're going to need fire fighters, but if you have hose pipes you won't need fire fighters.”
Layne said there were no immediate plans to build new fire stations in any of the informal settlements in the City of Cape Town.