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FISANTEKRAAL: TEENS, 5-YEAR-OLD BOY BATTLE BLAZE
Young heroes save the day
The hard work of a group of teenagers and also a five-year-old boy from Fisantekraal prevented farmworkers’ houses and a farm shop from catching fire when a veld fire broke out this past Saturday near Fisantekraal. Most of the children are part of a youth group that regularly repairs shacks in the informal settlement of Fisantekraal. Here Frank Junior Geduld is using a tree branch to extinguish the flames while Ethan Tarentaal assists with a bucket with water. PHOTO: ANDIE STEELE-SMITH
ESMÉ ERASMUS @erasmusesme
T
he “heroic action” of a handful of teenagers and a five-year-old boy from Fisantekraal prevented farmworkers’ houses and a farm shop from catching fire when a veld fire broke out this past Saturday. The fire broke out on the piece of farmland between Klipheuwel Road (R302) and Lichtenburg Road (R312) – next to Lichtenburg Road, opposite Fisantekraal.
The group of about 20 children – mostly between the ages of 10 and 19 years – raced into action and kept the fire away with wet blankets. This was when the fire was only 20m away from the houses on the Riverside Outspan farm on Klipheuwel Road. The boys and girls of the youth group EPIC Youth were busy helping Andie SteeleSmith from Durbanville to repair the shack of an elderly woman in the Fisantekraal informal settlement when at about 14:45 they noticed smoke coming from the nearby taxi rank.
“In the township context, when you see fire you run towards it rather than away from it, as fire devastates both lives and livelihoods,” Steel-Smith says. “So with that in mind, we left the work we were doing in the squatter camp and drove as fast as we could towards the fire. “As we approached the taxi rank, we realised that the fire was raging from Wellington Road (R312) towards the cottages on Riverside Outspan on Klipheuwel Road,” he says. He rushed to his home in Graanendal to fetch blankets and water buckets.
“The team used wet blankets and cut tree branches to fight back and stop the fire’s progress across a front of about 250 to 300m, while about six of us were fighting the fire directly. The rest of the team was running buckets of water to us to keep wetting the blankets,” he says. “Even before the three fire engines arrived, our EPIC Youth group had cut an effective fire break using nothing more than wet blankets and quickly-cut bluegum saplings. V To page 3.