qhobosheaneng fire

I was woken up this morning by a call from a friend; his message "Qhobosheaneng is on fire. It is raging out of control, the fire brigade - if you can call them that, is unable to deal with it and our neighbours (South Africa) have been summoned to help."

Qhobosheaneng was indeed on fire, the fire brigade's ineptitude was apparent as usual. They are not equipped to deal with any fire on any floor above the second floor. The third floor was on fire. This was a repeat of the Lesotho Sun fire, a comedy of errors if only it was not so serious.

Government offices are very susceptible to fire:

• there is too much paper
• the fire door are proped open
• there is no policy on buying heaters - thus open flame heaters (gas) and bar heaters proliferate, these are known to be dangerous.
• the total load on any of the electrical sockets is not monitored
• there is no fire detection system -even where one was installed it has been switched of or has not be tested.
• there is no fire suppression system in most places.
• no building has a fire marshal and thus there have never been any fire drills
• staff have never received any fire training.
• etc.

The real question now is what has been lost? I am not talking about the furniture and fittings but rather about the information that was kept in those offices, paper, computer files etc., how much of it can we reconstruct? A what cost? Will we learn? What will we do different next time?

Why that wing? Why those offices? Why now?