Michael Letsosa succumbed to a lethal cocktail of toxic smoke after making a gut-wrenching phone call. "I am dying," the 34-year-old firefighter told a colleague while trapped in the bowels of a burning building in Johannesburg's CBD.His was one of thousands of lives lost or scarred every year by fire in South Africa.Yet fire brigades in some provinces, crippled by sparse municipal funding, are ill-equipped to douse flames that cause direct loss of more than R2-billion a year.The human costs are immeasurable."Fires ... plague the country," says the latest South African Fire Loss Statistics report by the Fire Protection Association of Southern Africa.The fire safety and training specialists gather data from insurers and fire services, compiling an annual snapshot of the havoc wreaked by fire.block_quotes_start Their screams and the crackling sound of the fire eating away at them keep reverberating in our heads block_quotes_endIts release coincided with the pleas for help this week by 70-year-old Buyiswa Mjaleni as flames engulfed her home at Mdantsane in East London."My children, save my children," she begged. The shack was reduced to ashes and rubble in minutes, extinguishing the lives of her grandchildren Avuzwa, 5, and his sister Avethandwa, 3.Fire claimed 578 lives in 2013 - a 241% increase in recorded fatalities compared with 2004.The fatalities involved cars, motorcycles, bush fires, buses, hospitals and nursing homes, hotels and boarding houses, informal dwellings and suburban homes.Fires across residential, industrial, transport and commercial sectors resulted in direct losses estimated to be more than R2-billion in 2013 - nearly 1% of the country's gross national income.Comprehensive national fire statistics are sketchy.Stats SA flagged the deaths of 2227 people in 2013 as being due to exposure to smoke, fire and flames. Eight more died from contact with heat and hot substances. The underlying cause of death cited on death certificates was used as a benchmark.story_article_left1The association's data captured 42343 emergency fire brigade call-outs during 2013.Cape Town Fire and Rescue reported the most incidents, 9107, followed by eThekwini municipality at 7683, and Tshwane (4620).Electrical faults, heating, cooking, arson and smoking were the major underlying causes of fires at 4859 formal dwellings with combined losses estimated by insurers at R770-million.There were 4886 informal dwelling fires with losses of R117-million.Unlike traffic services, which issue fines to generate income, fire brigades rely heavily on municipal coffers to operate.Many lack basic fire equipment, vehicles and personnel.The Department of Co-operative Governance acknowledged in parliament last year that some parts of the Northern Cape had no fire engines or firefighters due to a "lack of funding".Parts of KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape, Free State, North West, Limpopo and Mpumalanga faced similar difficulties.The National Disaster Management Centre said some fire services were satisfactory, given their constraints, while others competed for money with basic services such as the provision of water, sanitation, electricity and refuse removal.Letsosa and his colleague Daniel Zwane died at Nedbank Mall in the Johannesburg CBD nearly two months ago. Traumatised colleagues claimed that they lacked the necessary equipment and were placed in unnecessary danger.Johannesburg Emergency Management Services spokesman Robert Mulaudzi said an internal investigation into the incident was continuing.Fumanekile Nqase, meanwhile, will forever be haunted by the death of his young neighbours at Mdantsane on Monday."Their screams and the crackling sound of the fire eating away at them keep reverberating in our heads," he told the Daily Dispatch...