The fire raged for the second day in a row at the South African Parliament in Cape Town, firefighters battling a new enemy on Monday evening: a strong wind, which revived violent flames that had been controlled several hours previously.
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Late in the evening, the emergency services had no idea how long they would still need to overcome the fire, which suddenly resumed shortly before 5:00 p.m. (3:00 p.m. GMT) without however causing any casualties. A thick column of smoke sounded the alarm, in a few minutes the flames were rising from the windows and roof of the imposing Victorian building.
“The wind makes things difficult,” firefighter spokesperson Jermaine Carelse told AFP, adding that “the fire has resumed in the roof of the building housing the National Assembly”.
The day before, the wooded room with the leather chairs where the deputies sit had been completely devastated. “There will be no meeting for a long time,” Carelse said.
In this most recent part of the vast edifice made up of three buildings built at different times, the firefighters first had to retreat on Sunday in the face of the intensity of the fire. But they had succeeded in taming the flames during the night, revealing then a black and soaked carcass, sad remnants of the Chamber.
AFP
In the morning, the emergency services declared that they had come to the end of the disaster. The night shifts had passed the hand, leaving the scene at the wheel of the trucks under the bravos of passers-by and journalists posted at the gate, in a general relief. But they had warned: inside this hell, the temperature remained incredibly high in places, beyond 100 degrees Celsius.
About sixty firefighters are still at work. Machines capable of projecting water at great height despite the wind arrived on site.
A 49-year-old man was arrested in Parliament on Sunday and charged with “burglary and arson”. He will be presented to justice on Tuesday.
The fire started on Sunday around 5 a.m., in the oldest wing of the building, completed in 1884, with the old rooms covered with precious wood and decorated with rich fabrics. This historic part, which once hosted parliamentarians, houses a bookstore and a museum.
The Parliament contains some 4,000 works of art and heritage, some of which date back to the 17th century.
AFP
There the roof was completely destroyed, leaving a gaping hole, but the invaluable collection of books and works of art seems to have been spared.
The last building housing the upper house of Parliament, called the National Council of Provinces, is still inaccessible, but relief workers believe that the damage will be mainly related to tons of water that have been spilled and smoke. Here too, invaluable artefacts are preserved.
A government delegation met in the middle of the day with experts and engineers, to establish an initial inventory and assess the cost of repairs. But the operation was limited for security reasons and experts tried to obtain images with a drone, before being interrupted by the resumption of fire. A preliminary report is due on Friday.
President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the site on Sunday.
According to investigators, the fire broke out in two separate homes and the automatic extinguishing system did not work properly because the water was turned off.
AFP
Surveillance cameras showed that the arrested man was present at around 2 a.m. “But the security did not see it until around 6 am, when they looked at the screens, alerted by the smoke,” the Minister of Public Works, Patricia De Lille, told AFP.
“The resumptions of fire exist, but we did not expect it to be so serious,” she added.
Parliament had already been affected by a quickly contained fire in March. Cape Town has been the seat of Parliament since 1910, when the government was installed, in Pretoria.
AFP
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