Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern Singapore

Chapter 6: The Inferno

The Inferno 127 127 6 The Inferno 174-A Kampong Tiong Bahru, About 2.50 p.m. At about 2.50 p.m. on Thursday, 25 May 1961, No. 174-A Kampong Tiong Bahru — an attap house in Si Kah Teng behind King’s Theatre, atop Tiong Bahru Hill — began to smoulder. A heat wave had recently descended upon Singapore, raising temperatures to 32 degrees Celsius (90 degrees Fahrenheit) and scorching the attap roofs of wooden houses to tinder-dry.1 The day was cloudy, anticipating rain that never came. The flames at 174-A fed on the flammable material and searing heat and created strong gusts of wind that drove the fire beyond the house. A block of Singapore Improvement Trust flats at King’s Theatre prevented them from moving eastwards. To the west stood more Trust flats built after the 1959 fire. There Samuel Seetoh and his family, victims of the earlier blaze, watched the growing conflagration without undue worry.2 But to the north there was no effective fire barrier, and the northwesterly wind quickly drove the flames downhill towards the cluster of wooden houses between them and Tiong Bahru Road. The Singapore Fire Brigade received a late call about the fire at 3.15 p.m. — nearly half an hour after the flames had started.3 Along Tiong Bahru Road, regular firefighters and Si Kah Teng’s volunteer firefighting squads, including a team organised by the Singapore 1 NFWP, 26 May 1961. 2 Author’s interview with Samuel Seetoh, 27 Apr. 2007. 3 FD, Annual Report 1961, p. 6. 128 Squatters into Citizens Rural Residents’ Association, fought the blaze with hoses, buckets and any containers they could lay their hands on. The wind-driven fire could not be halted, and the few available water hoses were soon burned through. The difficulties presented by the physical environment and the failure of administration — the twin problems that had plagued firefighting in urban kampongs in post-war Singapore — were manifest in Tiong Bahru and Bukit Ho Swee that day. At 3.30 p.m. the fire brigade finally contacted the water engineer to raise the water pressure by closing off mains in other areas. But as several hydrants were connected to the same mains, the action drastically lowered the water pressure and rendered five fire engines useless along Tiong Bahru Road. One firefighter had only a trickle of water, which did no more than wet his uniform. Others had to recycle water that had flowed from the hoses into the drains.4 The difficult terrain and lack of access to the wooden houses limited firefighting efforts to the flanks of the inferno, not its heart. According to Jaafar Sabar of the Auxiliary Fire Service, “[w]e did not know the exact place. The squatters were all over the place. It was difficult to walk and the fire engines could not go very far.”5 Firefighters joined as many as five hoses together to get close to the kampong houses, which substantially weakened the water pressure.6 The struggle against the blaze was also hampered by the lack of manpower immediately available for firefighting and crowd control. It happened to be Hari Raya Haji, a public holiday for Muslims, so most of the firefighters, who were Malay Muslims, were on leave. The two fire engines initially despatched to the scene quickly radioed Fire Control to “Make Pump 3” and despatch another fire engine to make three pumps in total, and four minutes later to “Make Pump 6”.7 Yet it was at least an hour before an island-wide radio alert at 4 p.m. recalled firefighters and policemen on leave to their posts, and another hour before they straggled onto the fire site, with many police arriving with helmets but not uniforms.8 The Sin Chew Jit Poh lamented that 40 minutes after the fire began, “on the four sides 4 Joan Hon, 100 Years of the Singapore Fire Service (Singapore: Produced and published for Singapore Fire Service by Times Books International, 1988), p. 78. 5 Oak3 Films, Jalan 2: The Bukit Ho Swee Fire, broadcast on 11 Dec. 2006. 6 OHC, interview with Jaafar Sabar, 29 July 1987. 7 Hon, 100 Years of the Singapore Fire Service, p. 78. 8 ST, 26 May 1961. The Inferno 129 Illustration 6.1 A fire engine is immobilised on the side of the road as Kampong Bukit Ho Swee...