A week-long water outage left a New Town family powerless to stop a fire that consumed all their belongings.
A week-long water outage left a New Town family powerless to stop a fire that consumed all their belongings.
Gcobisa Betela heard a loud bang in the kitchen while sleeping in another room at about 8am on Monday 30 September.
"I woke up in the morning and went to the nearby shop while the children where still asleep," she said. When she returned nobody was up yet and her brother was still at a neighbour's house so she went back to bed.
After hearing the loud noise from the other room Betela said she started to smell something burning.
As she got up to investigate she saw that neighbours had started to try put out the fire, which had started in the kitchen.
"We called the police and fire fighters to come and put out the fire, but by the time they arrived it was already too late," she said.
Had there been water, Betela believes that with the help of her neighbours they could have saved some parts of the house.
"There was no water in my area, we got water from a neighbour's tank and we used it to try and put out the fire," she told Grocott's Mail. "I think we would have been able to save some of the things if we had water."
Betela suspects the fire might have started in the electrical meter box in the kitchen.
The fire destroyed everything in the house and the only thing the family has left is the clothing on their backs.
Betela says since the fire they've been living with relatives in Vukani. "We lost everything, even my phone burned in that fire," she said.
The police were unavailable for comment at the time of publishing.
