My mate's house burnt down at the weekend. The fire gorged on his home in Goble Road like the Beast of the Apocalypse, its flames leaping out of the windows, devouring the eaves.Timber beams hissed and cracked. Corrugated roof sheets evaporated like tissues in the inferno.When the roof caved in the shouting on the street morphed into a collective sigh of defeat.Neighbours tearing around stopped and stood dumbstruck as a monstrous black cloud engulfed the 'hood.Shattering glass and bursting gas cylinders punctuated the hush.It was terrifying. Everyone wanted to know if JP and his mom were inside the house.The fire brigade was nowhere to be seen.Neighbours and passers-by rallied valiantly. It was magnificent to behold how people can respond so effectively to a crisis.People from all walks of life, across all classes and racial divisions, mucked in to help.Policemen stood around picking their noses, so a strapping fellow got a group of guys to push two cars out of JP's driveway.They tore open a hot iron gate and saved the cars from blowing up next to a block of flats.A cop jumped out of his police car with an automatic rifle, marched around looking rugged and stupid, then got back in his car and pissed off. The fire engine still hadn't arrived after 45 minutes and the fire station is about 5km away.A group of young men rescued JP's mom from the back yard where she had been gardening when the blaze took hold.Affable and polite, they were as attentive to her as the neighbourhood aunties clucking around.Watching this all play out, the reviews of RW Johnson's book, How Long Will South Africa Survive? The Looming Crisis, swirled around in my head.It is ridiculous that the fire engine took so long to arrive. Yet another example of what Johnson argues, how South Africa seems to "stagger from one crisis to the next".The country survives off the spirit of its people, in spite of comrades fixated with their wealth and internal ANC strife.I banged off a mail to city fire chief Mark te Water. What's an acceptable response time for a fire? He didn't say, but he said eThekwini fire and emergency services get between 9000 and 11000 calls a year and about 2000 of those are false alarms.That's an average over five years. In that time, fires have killed between 41 and 70 people a year. The city has 38 fire engines and 597 firefighters, with a budget of R309-million. The standard for fire hydrants is 85m apart in a built-up area, with a flow of 2000 litres a minute. Te Water is investigating the Goble Road delay...