Easy to start, hard to stopIT 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....Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21709956-shack-fires-are-menace-simple-fixes-could-help-prevent-burning-down?fsrc=rss
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