Prevention is vital
IT HAS been a none-too-pleasant festive season for more than a thousand people of Imizamo Yethu’s Zola Section after a fire destroyed 300 structures, leaving them to once again pick up the pieces of their lives.
The incident left a man dead. The Christmas and Boxing Day weekend also saw eight others lose their lives to fires across Cape Town. Whether these were due to human negligence or acts of arson are to be investigated.
But what is clear is that something has to be done to prevent these incidents, especially the fires in informal settlements which have now become an annual fixture on the disaster watch list. This is the fourth time this year that a fire has caused destruction in Imizamo Yethu.
The Hout Bay Civic Association has called on the City of Cape Town to look at ways of preventing further fires in the area. “The Hout Bay Civic Association believes that the City should prioritise this area because of its high vulnerability to shack fires. The City should either look at providing the residents with Nutech material (fire and rodent resistant) to rebuild their homes and/or paint the structures in the Zola area with fireproof paint. We call on the City to paint all these structures once re-erected with the fire proof paint.”
IT IS common cause that the densely populated informal settlements with their narrow pathways make it virtually impossible for fire engines and other emergency vehicles to gain access when a fire breaks out, so perhaps the civic association has a point regarding the practicality of fireproofing these structures.
They would do well to engage the City on this matter formally and perhaps start a hashtag movement which seems to be the mode du jour to grab people’s attention in South Africa today.
Informal settlements are here to stay for the foreseeable future and, with the economy set to shrink over the next five years or so, government social spending budgets will almost certainly be tightened. Hard times sometimes call for out-of-the-box-thinking; ideas which could not only save and change lives, but which could also save money.