Cape hit by 400 fires in 1 week
Firefighters stand next to the remains of a yacht- building factory that was gutted by fire on Monday. Firefighters stand next to the remains of a yacht- building factory that was gutted by fire on Monday.
A fire has gutted a multimillion-rand yacht building factory and several workshops in the latest blaze to rip through Cape Town in the past week.
The fire began early on Monday morning at a Wasteman recycling processing plant in Osmond Street in the Helderberg Industrial Park alongside the N2 in the Strand.
It quickly spread to Bongers Marine, the famous yacht-building facility owned by Simon Bongers - and the birthplace of South Africa's famous national yacht Shosholoza.
Bongers said numerous vessels inside the factory had been “reduced to a pile of ash”, including two 14m catamarans and a 13m powerboat.
Also inside the factory was an NSRI rescue vessel, the Sanlam Rescuer, which had been withdrawn from service in Gordon's Bay to be refurbished, and which had been due to be deployed off Mossel Bay.
“It's terrible, terrible, terrible,” said a distraught Bongers. “We have been working on these vessels for more than a year and the catamarans were three-quarters completed.”
Bongers said a woman and her daughter, who had been in a steel construction factory next door, had been lucky to escape with their lives, as the fire had moved southwards from his factory, fanned by the strong wind.
By 9am firefighters had extinguished the blaze and the smoke subsided enough to reveal hundreds of square metres of mangled factory roofing and equipment.
It is not yet known what caused the blaze.
Firefighters have fought hard to contain nearly 400 blazes in one week, in which one person died and hundreds lost their homes.
Fire and Rescue spokesman Theo Layne said fire services had responded to an average of 45 vegetation fires a day. Spikes included last Monday, when fire fighters were called out to 73 incidents. On Tuesday there were 81 and on Saturday, there were 63.
On Sunday Cape Town's emergency services dealt with 47 vegetation fires.
Layne said strong winds across the Cape in the past week had added to the number of fires.
A fire had ripped through the Jim Se Bos informal settlement in Philippi at about 10pm on Saturday. Fifty shacks were destroyed and more than 100 people left homeless.
In one of the shacks, Elton Oliphant, 40, and his partner Johanna Klein were asleep.
Neighbours said the fire had started at the shack next door to Klein, who said she had woken up, smelling smoke.
“I tried to knock the window open, but the smoke was too thick so see anything and so I ran out.”
She said Oliphant had been asleep and she could not get him to in budge. He had remained inside the inferno.
On Sunday morning police cordoned off the small section around the couple's charred bed.
Forensic specialists found a few teeth and a few shards of bone on the mattress's metal frame but an official siad he could not immediately determine whether these were human remains.
Klein, however, was convinced she had left her sleeping husband on the bed and said there was no way he could have escaped the blaze.
Community leader Mariam Flink said the couple had lived there for only about six months. She said each year the same thing happened - fires ripped through the settlement, leaving families devastated.
On Sunday morning firefighters worked for nearly four hours to contain a fire in Hout Bay. A pump house on a property in the area was damaged. - Cape Argus