Why the poor are burning
Lack of proper housing, access to land and regulations on erecting shacks put millions of lives at risk Housing backlog of over 2 million has seen the mushrooming of almost 3 000 informal settlements
Hundreds of fires erupting in informal settlements claiming lives and leaving thousands homeless can be prevented. This is the view of fire expert Wynand Engelbrecht, who said the solution included “simple training” for those living in informal settlements. “It doesn’t take a lot to teach people, you need to explain that if a shack is just one metre from another, wind can make fire jump [and spread easily].” Engelbrecht, an ex-fire station commander and trainer of firefighters, said there should be a standard practice for all shacks to be built six metres apart from each other – so that fires don’t easily spread when they break out.
He said government should be conducting such training informally “without spending millions or billions of rands”. At the weekend, more than 300 shack dwellings were gutted by fire in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, in a blaze which was fanned by strong winds and left over 1 000 people homeless. Cape Town’s MMC for social services JP Smith said 340 shacks were burnt down and 1 330 people were displaced. He said the city was helping those affected to rebuild their shacks by providing them with “rebuild kits”. Sowetan reported last month that nine children were killed by fire in two separate incidents, just a day apart, in shack fires in Kagiso and Alexandra.
Lack of proper housing has also been blamed. Department of human settlements’ Xolani Xundu said yesterday that the country’s housing backlog currently stands at 2.1 million. This has led to the country having 2700 informal settlements with Gauteng having 700 of them, Xundu said. Johannesburg informal settlements record more than 70 shack fires per month on average as the province plans to instal smoke alarms in high risk areas in the province. (Shack dwellers movement) Abahlali basemjondolo’s Sbu Zikode said the problem of shack fires was exacerbated by the lack of access to land which led to shacks being piled up “on top of each other”. “These fire incidents are avoidable, poor people have to be given access to land because it’s due to the shortage of land that people build shacks almost on top of each other.” Zikode said another problem was that authorities tend to decide for poor people without involving them in decisions about them. He said the poor will “never say no to a free house”, even if it’s built far away from their economic opportunities.
“They will take the house to either sell it or rent it out and go back to the shack which is closer to where they work.” Meanwhile, Johannesburg Emergency Services spokesperson Nana Radebe said they had already responded to 714 shack fires from January to date.
She cited Mangolongolo informal settlement, near the inner city, Princess in Roodepoort and Kathrada in Claremont as the most affected. “The city is training community emergency response teams and school emergency response teams to capacitate them with fire safety prevention methods,” she said. Neo Lebethe, spokesperson of the Gauteng department of cooperative governance, which houses the Provincial Disaster Management Centre, said they were already in the process of procuring smoke alarms to be installed in highrisk informal settlements. “This intervention will ensure that the lives of those living in informal settlements are saved during fire incidents.”