介绍： Fighting fires in South Africa: Burning down the house
Shack fires are a menace that simple fixes could help prevent
From The Economist 20161112

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Easy to start, hard to stop
IT CAN take less than two minutes for a shack to be engulfed by flames, from a fallen candle or a knocked-over paraffi...

介绍： Fighting fires in South Africa: Burning down the house
Shack fires are a menace that simple fixes could help prevent
From The Economist 20161112

Audio:

0:00



Easy to start, hard to stop
IT CAN take less than two minutes for a shack to be engulfed by flames, from a fallen candle or a knocked-over paraffin lamp. Shack fires in densely-populated South African slums often spread quickly and can threaten whole neighbourhoods. In Cape Town alone there were 1,519 fires in jam-packed informal settlements in 2015. Over 5,000 homes were affected. Around 100 people a year die in such blazes. “We are generally desensitised to hearing of yet another fire. The cost of human lives has no bearing here,” says Ashley Stemmett, who is trying to get that number down.

In May 2015 Mr Stemmett co-founded the Khusela Ikhaya Project, which is busy painting shacks with fire retardant paint. When exposed to heat, the paint chars and swells to form a shield that slows the fire’s spread. The project has already painted 2,000 homes, and ambitiously aims to cover 500,000 by the end of 2020. When a fire broke out at one of its pilot sites in May, residents who had lost their homes in previous fires testified to its worth. In an area containing some 400 dwellings, only 10 were burnt. No lives were lost. Without the paint, things would have been a lot worse.


Other organisations are going more high-tech. Lumkani, a Cape Town startup that is also trying to tackle shack fires, has designed a cheap early-warning fire-detection system. When its battery-powered detector is triggered, it alerts neighbouring devices and sends an SMS with the fire’s location to community leaders and the local fire department. Its detectors are already in 8,000 homes across South Africa. According to the company’s co-founders, the devices should not just save lives, but will reduce the costs of firefighting and rebuilding.

Meanwhile, local authorities are trying to teach people how to prevent fires. In Cape Town, the Fire and Rescue Service visits schools and runs campaigns on the dangers of open flames. Many slums are hard for the emergency services to enter, thanks to informal structures that block streets. To let the firefighters in, officials sometimes order these ill-placed shacks to be torn down. The owners are invariably furious. But their neighbourhoods end up safer.

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