FGimara

Yesterday afternoon Goico Plaza in Musanze, a multi-storey market, caught fire on its fifth floor, right among the second-hand clothes. The fire brigade came quickly. The fire was simply higher than their convenience. Nobody yet knows what started it, and I won’t pretend to. But as an engineer I know what kept it going, and Uganda should pay attention because we have a hundred Goicos. In Kampala we have made peace with disaster. Every rainy season downtown basements flood, traders bail them out with jerrycans, the pictures trend for a day, and we go back to business. Fire will not give us that luxury. A flood rises slowly enough for you to carry your stock upstairs. A fire in a packed arcade can engulf a floor in minutes, and the people upstairs have nowhere to carry anything, including themselves. Floods at least begin in the sky. Most building fires are made by us: by cheap wiring, the gas cylinder behind the counter, the stock blocking the only staircase, the padlock on the emergency exit. That is man-made evil, and it is preventable. Musanze gave us a warning without a funeral. We may not be that lucky twice. Fire needs fuel, air and heat. A floor of mivumba bales is not a shop, it is a firewood store with a price tag. Add ten irons on one extension cable and a charcoal stove for lunch, and the recipe is complete. Once a fire starts, hot smoke rises, so stairwells, lift shafts and ducts become chimneys pulling it up floor by floor. When the smoke under the ceiling reaches around 500 to 600°C, everything in the room ignites at once. Firefighters call it flashover, and after it nobody walks out of that room. And smoke, not flames, kills most people in building fires. Here is what most people miss. The fire brigade is not your fire safety plan. The building is. A fire ladder reaches about ten storeys, assuming the truck can get through traffic and park beside you at all, and it carries only a few minutes of water before it needs hydrants that are often buried or dry. So a building must fight its own fire from inside, with hose reels on every floor, alarms, and two staircases far enough apart that one fire cannot block both. Good design also divides a building into fire-rated compartments, so a fire stays where it started long enough for people to escape. Then we break it all, subdividing offices into hundreds of stalls, knocking holes through walls for cables and wedging fire doors open. Location matters too. Our downtown buildings share walls, with kiosks filling the gaps like a fuse and a fuel station or timber workshop next door. One landlord’s fire becomes the whole block’s fire. Why don’t our buildings have these protections? Because development here often follows a primitive path. A man saves for twenty years, buys a plot downtown, and decides that the architect, the engineer and the approved plans are luxuries. The second staircase becomes lettable space and the hydrant becomes a shop. Where the rules get in the way, a brown envelope makes the questions disappear. But every professional who is skipped leaves a risk behind in their place. Moving a staircase on paper costs an eraser. Adding one to a finished five-storey arcade costs a fortune, if it can be done at all. Proper fire design costs a small fraction of the building, while leaving it out risks the whole building, the stock, and the lives inside, and an insurer may refuse to pay out on a building never built to approved plans. The bribe looks cheap on the day you pay it. The fire collects the full bill later, with interest. A fool and his money are soon parted. Penny wise, pound foolish. There is one fix we can start tomorrow. Landlords pay guards to watch for thieves, yet nobody is paid to watch for fire. Every fire starts small, and in the first few minutes one trained person with an extinguisher who knows where to cut the power can end it. When the brigade is 40 minutes away in traffic, only someone already inside can respond in time. That is a fire safety officer, who walks the floors daily, catches the overloaded socket and the padlocked exit, trains traders as floor wardens and runs drills. Smaller arcades can share one officer, backed by trained wardens on every floor. And guards must be trained as part of the fire plan, because the instinct to lock doors against looters is exactly what kills people in fires. To traders, get a qualified electrician to audit your wiring, ban cooking inside the core of the arcades, profile your building’s fire risks, keep a working extinguisher in every shop, keep stairways clear, and insure your goods properly. To policy makers, make the @NBRBug National Building Review Board’s enforcement real in every town, especially when a building’s use changes; require certified fire safety officers in high-occupancy buildings; restore hydrants and clear encroachments; and make a structural assessment compulsory before any burnt building reopens. That last point comes from the concrete man. A building that looks standing after a fire is not necessarily standing. Concrete holds water in its pores, a bit like matooke in banana leaves. Heat it fast and that water turns to steam, bursting the surface off in chunks, which we call spalling. The steel bars inside are then exposed, and steel loses about half its strength at around 600°C. Worse, some damage comes after the fire is out. The cooked cement can reabsorb moisture and crack weeks later, and the cracks let in water that rusts the steel for years. The fire leaves, the damage stays. Only proper testing can declare such a building safe, and that costs far less than a funeral. A building’s fire safety is decided long before the first match is struck. It is decided the day the owner says, “We don’t need an engineer, the fundi knows.” At @ecoconcreteUG we lead with knowledge, and this is what we mean. When you hire an engineer, you are not buying concrete and steel. Any hardware shop sells those. You are buying the questions asked before the first column is cast: how will people get out, how will the fire engine get in, and what happens when the building next door burns. Hire the questions first. The concrete is the easy part. 🔥 My sympathies to the traders of Musanze.