Johannesburg: At least 73 people died when a nighttime fire ripped through a rundown five-storey building in Johannesburg that was used by homeless people, emergency services said on Thursday.
Some people living in the building in South Africa’s biggest city threw themselves out of windows to escape the blaze and might have died because of that, a local government official said. Seven of the victims were children, the youngest a one-year-old, according to an emergency services spokesperson.
Another 52 people were injured in the blaze, which broke out at about 1am (9am AEST) in the heart of Johannesburg’s central business district, Johannesburg Emergency Services Management spokesman Robert Mulaudzi said.
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”.
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.
“Over 20 years in the service, I’ve never come across something like this,” Mulaudzi said.
Fire fighters work on the scene of a deadly blaze that claimed the lives of dozens of people in downtown Johannesburg on Thursday.Credit: AP
The building’s interior was effectively “an informal settlement” where shacks and other structures had been thrown up and people were crammed into rooms, he said. There were “obstructions” everywhere that would have made it very difficult for residents to escape and hindered emergency crews trying to work through the site, according to Mulaudzi.
“So there [are] a lot of informal structures inside the building. There is a lot of debris that we have to remove.”