Nakumatt Fires (28 January)

On our way back to school from the CFS trip, I briefly overheard something about an electrical fire in town on the radio in the bus. The radio host was asking the power company to cut the power to the city center because of this fire. Come to find out, the store that was on fire was Nakumatt, our version of Wal-Mart. There are a good number of Nakumatt stores throughout Nairobi and even two of them are open 24 hours. This was the second incident at a Nakumatt store within about a month. In December the Kenyan government demolished a Nakumatt store, gas station and other stores because they were on “road reserve” land. The rumor was that the government had been giving these stores notice for the past three months that they were built on this reserve land and that they were going to be demolished. But these stores deny ever being warned of this. In the end, the government came with demolition machines and started to demolish the stores that still had their full stock. The gas station was pleading to let them drain as much gas as possible before they were torn down. So as of now, the government has not used this land for road expansion. Getting back to the fire, it was a very tragic incident. There were not many exits and the front, main entrance/exit was just the size of a double-doorway. Many people burned to death in the fire. This sparked more attacks to Nakumatt, especially after the other one was demolished. Also the government is now building a fire station in the city center in case of any future fires. Unfortunately people had to die in order for safety precautions to be put in place. The pictures were taken by me the day after the fire. Smoke was still coming out of the building.