Cape Town's tinderbox: Khayelitsha's TR section has more fires than any other residential area

A badly scarred Sajimi Siphumle stands in one of the narrow, sandy passageways that separate most of the 3,300 households in TR Section in Khayelitsha.

TR Section, with its population of just under 9,000 residents, experiences a residential fire every 1.75 days.

Moving gingerly and speaking slowly, Siphumle recalls what he can of the night in late March when he and his neighbour lost everything in a fire.

His neighbour, 27-year-old Sinvuyo Qwalana stands next to the remains of a scorched couch.

ESA ALEXANDER, SUNDAY TIMES
LIFE IN RUINS: 27-year-old Sinvuyo Qwalana with her brother's child outside the remains of her shack in TR section.
Picture: ESA ALEXANDER, SUNDAY TIMES

Siphumle was asleep when a fire raged through his shack, destroying everything inside and mutilating parts of his body.

Flames from the blaze leaped across the half-metre gap between his shack and his neighbour’s, engulfing the adjacent structure with the same devastating effect to its contents, before both fires were put out by neighbours.

They are just two of the many families likely to be affected by fires in TR Section this year.

The small township just off the N2 about 25km outside of the Cape Town CBD can only be described as a tinderbox, in a city where fires wreak havoc in informal settlements annually.

TR Section is Cape Town's worst affected suburb by some distance.

For the past seven years, 1,457 residential fires have been recorded in TR Section according to data collected by the City's Disaster Risk Management. In the same period, the second worst affected suburb, Gugulethu, had 817 incidents.

“No matter where you go in TR Section you will hear the same story - that shacks are burning all the time,” Qwalana said

Qwalana is correct. All through TR Section there are shack walls licked by flames. It is boxed in by a main road and an expanse of veld much larger than the township.

Throughout people are rebuilding, and along the main road a newly erected shack stands next to the rubble where a brick house recently stood.

“This is where we lived,” 20-year-old Asavela Ntsinde explains, pointing to the rubble. “We had an upholstery business running here, it was a workshop where we made sofas.”

The main road along the length of TR Section is lined with repair businesses.

ESA ALEXANDER, SUNDAY TIMES
AFTER THE FIRE: “This is where we lived,” says 20-year-old Asavela Ntsinde. “We had an upholstery business running here, it was a workshop where we made sofas.” 
Picture: ESA ALEXANDER, SUNDAY TIMES

“It (the workshop) burned down in February and the [city] only gave us enough material to rebuild one house for the whole family. The house next door, where an old woman and two children lived, burned down too. And a third house was destroyed when (one of the walls of) our brick house fell over on top of it," says Ntsinde.

The causes of the fires at Ntsinde's and Siphumle's homes are still unknown.

It is part of a greater problem in the the City of Cape Town municipality, where the number of residential fires has increased from 1,939 to 2,837 between 2009 and 2015, up by 46%.

Patricia Zweig, from the Research Alliance for Disaster and Risk Reduction at the University of Stellenbosch, said the use of candles and paraffin stoves, as well as poor and illegal electrical connections, were among the main causes of informal residential fires, but they were not the only reasons.

“[In many informal settlements] the problem is obviously one of density and lack of adequate water sources to put out fires on site,” Zweig said. “We would need supersonic speed fire engines to respond fast enough to an informal settlement fire. A shack can burn down in less than a minute.”

ESA ALEXANDER, SUNDAY TIMES
LIFE ON THE EDGE: Electricity workers on Mew Way, Khayelitsha, prepare for a foray into TR Section.
Picture: ESA ALEXANDER, SUNDAY TIMES

Spokesman for the City's Disaster Risk Management, Theo Layne, added that the reasons for the fires in TR Section were not very different to those of other informal settlements. While there were no immediate plans to build new fire stations near any informal settlements, he said a vehicle was dispatched to a fire as soon as the call was received.

But for people like Ntsinde who had to rebuild and live in fear of the threat that has already taken away so much, more needs to be done.

“What they could do is set out hosepipes to make it easier for us,” he said. “We could put out the fires ourselves instead of waiting for the fire fighters.”

• This story was produced in collaboration with the Code for South Africa Data Journalism Academy