Fires are here to stay — we just have to find ways to reduce loss
SA has its fair share of deadly blazes and entrepreneurs are now designing preventative tools
WHAT’S REMARKABLE IS THE WAY THEY’RE PLOUGHING OVER CITIES, WHICH WE THOUGHT HAD BEEN BANISHED A CENTURY AGO
The sun burnt a bright orange colour I had never seen before. It was late afternoon when we drove back to Knysna from outside Plettenberg Bay two weeks ago. The ash and smoke that gave the sky a faint hue affected the sun’s rays in a way only a romantic painter could imagine at sunset, and it was only 3pm.
When we had arrived in George it was with a car covered in snow-like ash. It was the first of many days where we would be covered in the fallout from the huge fires that have been plaguing the Garden Route. Rumours in town hinted that it was a man-made spark that started the two fires east of us, unlike the lightning strike blamed the previous year.
People were worried it would be a repeat of the June 2017 fires, in which seven people died and at least 1,000 homes were destroyed.
The mark of those fires is still visible on the land, with both sides of the N2 flanked by burnt trees like something out of an apocalyptic movie. Almost 10,000 people were evacuated in 2017. Our hosts said many found their way to quaint and upmarket Leisure Isle in the Knysna lagoon to sleep in their cars, hoping surrounding water and wetlands would act as a barrier from nature’s onslaught.
Unfortunately, this year’s fire would prove worse, wreaking four times the devastation of 2017, according to reports by the joint operations centre. Last week, the centre reported that more than 86,000ha had burned in the Outeniqua-De Vlugt area, compared with about 22,000ha in the 2017 fires.
From the plane heading back north this would translate into plumes of smoke snaking their way along the green coastal belt across the horizon.
Similar scenes are playing out across California. Last week in the early hours of Thursday Camp Fire tore through the golden state, with the Woolsey and Hill fires igniting hours later. Camp Fire would go on to devastate the town of Paradise and destroy 72,000 structures, 1,700 more than the fire that held the record in the state previously.
It would seem that six years of drought combined with historically high temperatures and relentless east winds created tinderbox conditions in the state’s forests and hills. By Monday night the three fires had already claimed 42 lives, with a further 200 people reported missing. According to the California forestry & fire protection department, authorities will be lucky to contain the fires by the end of November.
Stephen Pyne, a wildfire expert at Arizona State University, told Wired Magazine he had seen a real change in recent years. Fires used to destroy mostly outlying suburbs or scattered enclaves. “But what’s remarkable is the way they’re ploughing over cities, which we thought was something that had been banished a century ago.”
It is a situation that will undoubtedly get worse the closer we creep towards the forecast temperature increase caused by climate change. Not to mention our continued failure to provide safer living situations for the 13.8-million people living in extreme poverty in this country. As it stands, fires already cost our municipalities R132.5bn in informal settlements and R997.6bn in formal settlements in 2015/16, according to the Fire Protection Association of Southern Africa.
Though technically fire is civilisation’s oldest form of technology, we have not made significant strides in our age-old battle to control it in the wild.
But a group of young South Africans may have found ways to help contain the problem in more urban areas.
Lumkani, a local start-up that created a revolutionary new fire detector in 2014, seeks to use hardware to mitigate the risk of fires starting.
“Financial services like insurance, which include people in the financial sector, are key components to a solution Lumkani has introduced in SA and abroad,” says CEO David Gluckman. Their small aquacoloured plastic box, no bigger than the palm of your hand, uses heat detection instead of smoke detection. This small but revolutionary twist on the classic detector takes into account that many informal settlements make use of wood or coal fires for food, light and warmth, which has reduced the number of false alarms significantly.
But where this device truly shines is in its ability to create a community. By connecting through radio signals, Lumkani not only alerts the household in question but within 20 seconds the detector will trigger all the devices within a 60m radius of the fire, summoning assistance in real time and saving lives.
Lumkani was inspired to originally help people in densely populated areas such as Cape Town’s Khayelitsha, which suffered a major fire in October that claimed one life and left 4,000 people homeless as it tore through the settlement.
Gabriella Mogale, a matriculant at Collegiate Girls’ High School in Port Elizabeth who was inspired by the 2017 Knysna fires to create her project, drew a lot of attention at Eskom’s Expo for Young Scientists. She presented a groundbreaking way to insulate shacks and make them more fire resistant, which she tested on a small shack replica for a month.
Though still in the early stages, Mogale’s design is based on the notion of insulating the shack from hot and cold temperatures by plastering the outside with a mixture of cement and other products and the inside with recyclable goods.
“The ultimate goal is to erase the anxiety of fire through prolific technology,” says Gluckman. “We will never eradicate fire completely, but we can clearly visualise it not being the terror and risk it currently is.
“The question of when is interesting. When will people leave shacks? As long as we have shacks there will be shack fires, and estimates suggest [they won’t be eradicated] for another 50 years.”
Gluckman believes that if Lumkani’s technology were to come into widespread use, possibly through a policy intervention at government level, loss of life and property associated with fires in the country would decrease dramatically.