20 January 2025
A fire above Lakeside, Cape Town, was swiftly extinguished in January 2023 after the City dispatched several helicopters and numerous firefighters. The quick response ensured the fire didn’t cause major damage. Archive photo.
A devastating fire, such as the one that has raged in Los Angeles over the past two weeks, could occur in Cape Town, say experts.
In Los Angeles, a hot summer and autumn combined with an unusually dry winter, led to the vegetation in the hills around the city being highly combustible. As a result, a fire that started on 7 January, fanned by strong, dry Santa Ana winds from the north-east, could not be contained. It swept across more than 160km2 – equal to more than 6% of the entire Cape Town municipality. At least 27 people have died and about 15,000 homes and businesses have been destroyed. Climate change contributed to the scale of the disaster.
Cape Town has a similar climate, mountainous topography and vegetation to Los Angeles. It is also subject to strong winds and prone to wildfires. If hit by a fire in similar dry and windy conditions, the city could face a similar fate.
This is apart from the thousands of shack fires that occur in informal settlements every year. There were 2,025 shack fires in 2024, and 2,320 in 2023, according to City Fire Services spokesperson Jermaine Carelse.
Carelse did not say how many individual homes these destroyed, or how many people had died in these fires, but almost every shack fire destroys numerous homes – sometimes hundreds – and often result in deaths and serious injuries.
Cape Town also has thousands of wildfires, or vegetation fires, every year. The City’s Fire and Rescue Service says there were more than 7,000 in the 2023/24 financial year. Many of these are relatively small and quickly contained, such as those on road verges. But others are not so easily contained, such as the 2023 Castle Rock fire which started in Simon’s Town. Fanned by strong winds, it burnt thousands of hectares and endangered numerous properties as it made its way to Scarborough, where residents had to be evacuated.
There is no guarantee a fire such as this, the recent fires above Kalk Bay, or any of the numerous fires that ignite each season on Table Mountain, would not expand to the disastrous scale experienced in Los Angeles.
“You can only plan for it; you can’t prevent it,” says Cape Peninsula Fire Protection Association (CPFPA) chairperson Philip Prins.
Prins explained that proper planning can limit the scale of such a disaster. Wind, rain, climate change and the ignition of the fire – whether deliberate, accidental, or through natural causes such as lightning – cannot be controlled. But what can be controlled is the fuel load from cleared and stacked alien vegetation, alien vegetation itself, and controlled burning of old and woody fynbos that has not burned for ten to 15 years, which is a natural burning cycle for the biome.
Firebreaks are also an essential preventative measure. While firebreaks between the urban-wildland interface are unlikely to stop a wildfire, particularly in high winds in which embers will blow across the break, they dampen the fire’s progress, allow access for firefighters, and create a defensible line, explained Prins.
Although the City of Cape Town in 2022 terminated a 13-year agreement with the South African National Parks (SANParks) to maintain the peninsula’s firebreak network, reportedly due to changes in the supply chain management process, Prins says a new agreement has been reached.
He said the City now appoints contractors to maintain the firebreaks, and the CPFPA manages this.
The City did not respond to GroundUp’s questions about this.
Although Los Angeles has “a lot more” firefighting resources than Cape Town, Prins said national preventative legislation, as contained in the Veld and Forest Fire Act, as well as regulations on alien species – many of which contribute to the intensity of wildfires – is much better than California’s.
“I was there in 2018 and visited those areas that have [since] burnt and I think we have some of the best legislation,” he said.
“The veld and Forest Fire Act is very specific regarding firebreaks, for instance”, both on public and private land.
Los Angeles’s houses, in contrast to Cape Town, are predominantly made of wood. While this possibly made matters worse, it’s not entirely straightforward as this article explains.
“Mega fires, such as the Los Angeles fires, and the Knysna fires of 2017, are too large to manage with traditional firefighting techniques, so the answer lies in preventative measures,” says Western Cape environment MEC Anton Bredell.
He echoed Prins’s statement on the need for firebreak maintenance and alien clearing, adding that town planning needed to incorporate buffer zones between urban development and “wilderness areas”.
Prins said this was something he hadn’t seen when he visited Los Angeles.
“In Cape Town you can’t build above a certain line, and there is a firebreak between the urban edge and the mountain. But in California, people build right in the midst of the vegetation, on top of the mountain,” said Prins.
Head of the Provincial Fire and Rescue Services team at the provincial Disaster Risk Management Centre, Etienne du Toit, said the operational challenges of the Los Angeles fire “were no different to those experienced during the 2017 Knysna fires”.
The Knysna fires resulted in eight deaths (two of them firefighters) and the loss of 1,444 homes, according to retired Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE) deputy director general Guy Preston.
“Quite simply put, all systems were completely overwhelmed by the pure magnitude of the event,” said Du Toit. “The message, reinforced through global experiences in dealing with mega fires, is that these fires simply cannot be fought. The answer lies in adapting the environment and reducing the risk following scientific guidelines informing practical solutions.”
He said the Western Cape’s firefighting, fire prevention and disaster management were supported by a provincial budget allocated to municipalities and “various organisations”.
Although asked, neither he nor Bredell gave the provincial budget figure for the last two financial years, saying only that R120-million from conditional grants was distributed for fire services. (The Los Angeles Fire Department has an annual budget of about R15-billion.)
The City of Cape Town did not respond to questions on budgetary allocations, but a search of documents on the City’s website indicates the budget for fire fighting and prevention is likely below R1-billion.
Du Toit said fire services in the province involve district and local municipalities, fire protection associations, the Provincial Disaster Management Centre (PDMC), and “other stakeholders”. The City of Cape Town’s Fire and Rescue Service collaborates with these agencies, with coordination overseen by the PDMC and the City’s Disaster Risk Management Centre.
He said a mutual aid agreement ensures resources are shared across municipalities and agencies during major fires, and the provincial response strategy was based on a “credible scenario” and a realistic approach to optimally align all available resources.
Preston, who while at the DFFE established Working on Fire and other Expanded Public Works agencies, believes invasive alien plants are “the single biggest threat in terms of wildfires in South Africa”.
Preston said given a conflagration of adverse conditions, what happened in Los Angeles could well occur in Cape Town.
“Authorities are stretched … [there are] budget limits, firefighting capacity is limited.”
But, he said, by removing invasive alien plants such as pines, gum trees, wattles, and hakea, homeowners could do much to prevent fires endangering their property during strong berg or southeast winds. These had “devastating impacts” when it came to increasing the intensity of wildfires.
He said palm trees and cypress trees, although not listed as invasive alien species, were also very fire prone.
He noted that of the 56 structures that were destroyed in the Table Mountain fire in 2000, every one was surrounded by invasive plants. After a massive effort to clear invasive species off 6,000 hectares of land, the extensive Table Mountain fire of March 2015 destroyed eight structures, seven of which were surrounded by alien invasive species.
The devastation of the Knysna fire could also have been averted, he said, despite the adverse weather conditions, if the proliferation of invasive plants had been dealt with.
Prins stressed that educating land and home owners on the danger of invasive species, as well as the need to accommodate controlled burning of old fynbos, rather than complaining of smoke pollution, was one of the key pillars to prevent a fire disaster in Cape Town on the scale Los Angeles has just experienced.