Dunoon Fire Victims Rush to Rebuild Homes as City Proposes Reblocking

• Thousands of families at Doornbach informal settlement also known as Site 5 in Dunoon were left homeless on Friday when over 600 structures burnt down.
• Many of the residents have started collecting material to rebuild their homes after the City of Cape Town cleared the site.
• The City has proposed reblocking the settlement. However, this was met with anger and pushback from residents.
• The City set aside R12-million to reblock the site. Contractors are on standby to do the work.

Dunoon pensioner Sidwell Soyizwapi was still wearing the clothes he had on last week when his life’s savings burnt to the ground. Over 630 other homes at Doornbach informal settlement, also known as Site 5, also burnt down.

A decade ago, Soyizwap saved up R26,000 to buy a shack on a six-by-six-metre plot in the community. Over the years, he extended and built a double-storey structure, with an upstairs room for himself and his wife and a ground floor that doubled as a makeshift garage for his car.

His structure was levelled by a blaze that erupted shortly after 10am on Friday, leaving about 2,600 residents homeless. The next day, mayco member for human settlements, Carl Pophaim, said the City was considering sustainable ways to “respond to these fires”.

“We’re proposing reblocking. Community leaders are consulting residents to get their buy-in,” he said.

Unsure of what the reblocking proposal would mean for their tenure, many residents rushed to secure their plots. On Monday, some people collected material to rebuild, while others whose brick homes were destroyed began buying cement blocks to start again. Burnt Eskom poles lay scattered across the ground, wires still dangling. Nearby, queues snaked for nearly three kilometres as residents waited for food parcels from the charity Gift of the Givers.

Among them was Soyizwapi. He said he was fortunate to have managed to move his car while the fire tore through the settlement.

He added that he was not opposed to reblocking, provided the City allocated him a plot of the same size.

Ntombie Matiwana was visiting her sister in Khayelitsha when her home burnt down. She lost all her belongings and important documents in the fire.

Doornbach has long featured in the City of Cape Town’s reblocking plans, outlined in the Integrated Human Settlements five-year sector plan 2022/23 to 2026/27.

The plan lists Doornbach for a “super blocking” upgrade under the Upgrading of Informal Settlements Programme (USIP). It estimates that around 3,310 households could be affected, but confirms the project is still at the planning stage.

Community leader Zukiswa Kobe said residents had been briefed about reblocking plans several years ago. She said when some people heard of the City’s latest reblocking proposal, anger flared. They felt the authorities were taking advantage of the disaster, she added.

According to Kobe, land at the Winning Way business park, purchased by the Western Cape government, had been earmarked for Doornbach residents as part of earlier housing commitments. Instead of being developed for permanent homes, the land was diverted during covid.

She said residents are now demanding the serviced plots they were originally promised.

Bulelwa Mayende, the acting ward councillor, said reblocking was not the problem. The concern, she said, was that residents felt the plan was being forced on them. “For the past 15-years reblocking was in the pipeline. It was welcomed by the community,” said Mayende.

Disaster Risk Management spokesperson Charlotte Powell said on Tuesday that Eskom and the City’s Water and Sanitation Department were working to repair damaged infrastructure in the area. She said Solid Waste teams were busy clearing debris.

SASSA will provide relief over the coming days, while Disaster’s mobile joint operations centre remains in the area to oversee rehabilitation and recovery.

In a statement this week, Pophaim said, “We acknowledge the distress experienced by residents and understand the mistrust which has emerged because of past delays.” He said R12-million is available for the site to be reblocked and contractors are on standby to begin work immediately.

Further questions about the reblocking were sent to the City but no response had been received by the time of publication.

Many people are sceptical of the municipality’s plans to reblock the area.

© 2026 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.

We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.