Reason #10 million to love ESCOM
Posted By Sika on July 22, 2008
Last saturday, sometime between 1 and 3am, our kitchen and cafeteria (called kef in Chichewa) burned up (not down, as the building is still intact). No one was hurt. ESCOM says that the reason why the kef burned up is that the kitchen staff forgot to turn off the outlets to the cooker or whatever*. ESCOM failed to mention why outlets that aren’t shut off should start a raging fire. Maybe because fire is so much fun?
Yesterday, when I came in, the cafeteria was blackened entirely. Most of the part beyond the dividers, the part we use when we’re giving exams, was intact if discolored, but all the lights were just layers of broken glass scattered on the ground. The area between the kitchen and the dividers was a sooty, wrecked mess, and there wasn’t much recognizable in the appliance carcasses still in the kitchen. In the exam area, furniture had been hastily gotten out of the way, I assume during the fire. But some of the plastic chairs had been too close to the heat, the seats melted to a plastic filigree oozing to the tables below. There was a chair that got swept out amongst the detritus, still recognizably chair-shaped, but so flat it’s practically two dimensional. Cleaning has led to piles of soot and ash scattered throughout the kef; the newly cleaned bits of concrete floor play up exactly how stained the walls and the remaining floor are.
Lucy told me that the repairs are estimated to be in the neighbourhood of MK10 million (about $70,000) and probably won’t be completed until well into next year. Until then, the cooks are making meals for over a hundred with charcoal. Lucy seemed to think the kitchen staff had forgotten to flip the switches and were just covering their asses when they insisted they hadn’t forgotten.
Then, yesterday, around 4:30pm, the geography something or other offices across the street started to burn up. Hmm, they don’t have a kef: wonder what ESCOM’s going to blame that fire on.
It was interesting to see the reaction to the fire. Everybody was out and nobody was hurt, so it was just a spectator sport. When Lucy came in to my office to tell me about the fire, and I couldn’t tell if she was excited or worried, but she obviously expected me to go look. There aren’t any sources of high powered water, so when the fire trucks finally came (I think only the second time I’ve heard sirens in Zomba), they were the old school type that carry their own water. They look down-right archaic to me. Behind the first truck were one motor and two pedal bikes. At first I thought maybe they were part of the fire brigade, since that would seem to be awfully Malawian, but really I think they just followed the sirens to see what all the hubbub was about. Which is also awfully Malawian. The firefighters got the fire under control. And then they ran out of water. When we left for home, the fire brigade was calling out to the Airwing for assistance. Or something like that. I debated getting stuff out of my office, just in case, but ended up deciding it wasn’t worth the hassle to collect my lotion and my Danskos. And the office is still here, so I guess that was the right choice.
*Here there’s a switch on all outlets that allow you to turn off the power to the outlet itself, thus ensuring that you’re not accidentally using electricity when you think you’re not. It’s also good to protect against power surges, although unplugging stuff is also important for that.
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