A fire started at a house in Impala Street in Carletonville on 8 July.
The incident took place around 11:00 and was noticed by a neighbour, Mrs Annelien Schwartz. She came out of her house as she was on her way to town when she saw smoke coming from the house. There were four children in the house, two boys and two girls but their parents were not home.
Luckily the children escaped unharmed when the realised the house was on fire.Two women who stay in the backroom were also not injured. Schwartz called the fire department before getting the hose pipe from her own yard. She asked the children to connect the pipe while a lady who was passing in the street came to help them. Schwartz then went into the yard and attempted to extinguish the fire from the outside with assistance from her son, Schawn who also came to help. Unfortunately at that stage, the entire room had been engulfed in flames.
The fire spread to the other rooms and there was thick, black smoke coming out of the house. Schwartz and her son were forced to stand down. The entire house, except for two rooms and the bathroom went up in flames. The roof collapsed and the windows exploded from the heat. No one was injured in the incident.
It took the fire department less than 30 minutes to arrive at the scene and extinguish the flames. Apparently the fire was caused by an electrical fault. The eldest of the children in the house, a teenage girl, had woken up to the fire in the bedroom. According to Schwartz, the children were very traumatised. “I was also very scared but I realised that the children were not going to be able to help themselves and that is why I took action,” she says.
