A report by the City of Cape Town has revealed that the automated fire doors in Parliament were already open when the fire started, making it impossible to contain.
Speaking to CapeTalks’s John Maytham, Cape Town MMC for Safety and Security JP Smith said that there were a number of reasons why the doors were not properly closed.
“The fire doors are in passages and corridors where presumably people need to pass through and so instead of having to difficulty in opening or closing those, some of them were simply latched and that meant that when the fire came they didn’t do their job of denying the fire access to further areas and there’s a lot of fuel load in those halls, buildings and rooms, a lot of wood paneling and thick carpets… otherwise, lots of things that could burn,” Smith said.