Fire damage

Comment by the Editor, The Witness, 16 june 2009 on the devastating fire and the inability of the ill equipped fire department to save a colonial icon in Pietermaritzburg.


IT is ironic that only two weeks after The Witness published as its leading story an exposé of the inadequacies of the city’s firefighting capacity, Pietermaritzburg should have been afflicted by the worst fire disaster since its city hall burnt to the ground in 1898. It is doubly ironic that it could well have been restoration work on the Colonial Building, which has been disgracefully neglected for many years, which quite literally, sparked the inferno. A further irony is that on the very day of the fire, a correspondent to this paper pointed out that the Lion’s River Fire Protection Association is better equipped than Msunduzi.

In terms of the loss of architectural heritage, Friday’s fire is in the same tragic league as that of 1898. Fortunately, not being a “working” building, there was no equivalent loss of priceless records as was the case when the first city hall burnt down. But what if it had been the current city hall? Or Natalia? Or the deeds office? Or the master’s office? Mercifully, too, the fire broke out on a calm and windless day. What might have happened had there been a hot, howling berg wind blowing is a prospect too ghastly to contemplate. Everything downwind ­— the old Presbyterian Church across the road, the master’s office, the Tatham Art Gallery, the complex of parliamentary buildings, perhaps even the Natal Museum and the Imperial Hotel — could have been consumed in an appalling and unstoppable fire storm which would have torn the very heart out of the city.

Mayor Zanele Hlatshwayo declares herself “deeply disturbed”. Two weeks ago the city fathers declared that they were unaware of the parlous state of our fighfighting capacity. They certainly know now. One hopes that disturbance at the highest levels will immediately translate into vigorous action further down the chain of command. The obvious shortcomings in our ability to fight fires must be rectified with all possible speed — lack of pressure in the fire hydrants, leaky hoses, defective fire engines, uncertain command arrangements in a time of crisis — to ensure that nothing similar can take place and the damage of future fires can be mitigated.

Whether the Colonial Building can ever be restored to its former glory remains to be seen. Let us hope it can, although Pietermaritzburg in 2009 does not contain anything like the pool of building and masonry skills that it had in 1898. The least that can be done, however, is to fix that which can be fixed.