Residents have started rebuilding their lives after a devastating fire swept through the Kayamandi informal settlement.
|||Cape Town - Residents have started rebuilding their lives after a devastating fire swept through a Stellenbosch informal settlement last month.
The blaze, in Kayamandi, Zone O, killed one person and left thousands homeless. It started in the early hours of March 14. Fanned by strong winds it spread through the tightly packed shacks.
The aftermath left 4 500 people homeless and destroyed 1 357 shacks, said Vernon Bowers, spokesman for the Stellenbosch municipality.
He said the fire was believed to have started when a paraffin stove was left unattended. The municipality had provided temporary shelter for residents in two community halls.
Bowers said residents had moved back to the informal settlement to start rebuilding their homes over the weekend.
“We have spent the past weeks cleaning and preparing the area. We are now working on the electrical network and ablution facilities, which will cost millions to repair,” he said.
“It’s an ongoing process. We’re not only working on getting things back to normal, we want to improve their lives and living conditions.”
When the Cape Argus visited the informal settlement on Wednesday, residents were hard at work. Most of them were using a mixture of building materials they salvaged from the fire and kits they received from the municipality to set up home again. The building kits include nails, corrugated sheets and wooden poles.
Resident Gents Silekala, 55, who started building his two-roomed shack on Sunday, said if it wasn’t for the help of local businesses, which donated some of the building materials, he would have had to build a smaller shack.
“It’s a struggle for us; we lost everything in the fire. The important thing right now is finishing the shack.”
Silekala has lived in the area for 10 years. “Since I’ve lived here we have had two fires. This was the bigger of the two. It was chaos that night. We tried to save what we could but the way the fire quickly spread from the bottom to the top… we couldn’t hang around in that heat,” said Silekala.
Around the corner from Silekala’s shack, Mwabisa Kala, 25, was putting the finishing touches to her home. Piles of clothing, pots and pans were littered around the two-roomed shack. Kaka was laying a mat on a muddy floor. She said water seeped through the floor when it rained.
nontando.mposo@inl.co.za
Cape Argus