South Africa
Night fire razes South African building, 73 dead, scores rescued
A night fire razed down a five-story building in Johannesburg occupied by squatters and homeless people, killing at least 73 people, emergency services in South Africa’s biggest city said.
Some of the people living in a maze of shacks and other makeshift structures inside the building threw themselves out of windows on Thursday to escape the fire and might have died then, a local government official said. Seven of the victims were children, the youngest a one-year-old, according to an emergency services spokesperson.
As many as 200 people may have been living in the building, witnesses said.
Emergency crews expected to find more victims as they worked their way through the building, a process slowed by the conditions inside. Dozens of bodies were lined up on a nearby side road, some in body bags, and others covered with silver sheets and blankets.
Another 52 people were injured in the blaze, which broke out at about 1am on Thursday (23:00 GMT on Wednesday) in the heart of Johannesburg’s central business district, Johannesburg Emergency Management Services (EMS) spokesperson Robert Mulaudzi said.
‘Hijacked’ apartheid-era building
Abandoned and broken-down buildings in the area are common and often taken over by people desperately seeking some form of accommodation. City authorities refer to them as “hijacked buildings”.
A sign on the entrance to the gutted block shows it was a heritage building of South Africa’s apartheid past, where Black South Africans came to collect their dompas – documents that would enable them to work in white-owned areas of the city.
Mulaudzi said the death toll was likely to increase and more bodies were likely trapped inside the building. The fire took three hours to contain, he said, and firefighters had only worked their way through three of the building’s five floors by mid-morning.
“This is a tragedy for Johannesburg. Over 20 years in the service, I’ve never come across something like this,” Mulaudzi said.
Al Jazeera’s Fahmida Miller, reporting from Johannesburg, said the death toll has risen sharply from the fire, which broke out in the early hours.
“It is an abandoned building, and once that has happened it’s then taken over, in what they say in South Africa, it’s ‘hijacked’ and the rooms are rented out to people,” Miller said.
“The building was densely populated. The emergency services said that there were no regulations within the building. We’ve also heard from the council that the building should have been condemned,” she said.
“There were very few restrictions in terms of safety,” she added.
The cause of the fire is not yet known, according to EMS and city administration officials.
Though the fire was largely extinguished, smoke could be seen seeping from the windows of the blackened building.