A Johannesburg building with dangerous conditions blazed by squatters in the wake of a severe fire in September 2017: 74 deaths and dozens of injured
A blaze on Thursday tore through a building in Johannesburg where squatters lived in dangerous conditions, city officials said, killing at least 74 people and injuring dozens of others in one of the deadliest residential fires in South Africa’s history.
This is nothing new in this city of 6 million but made headlines this week after the worst fire in recent memory prompted renewed calls for action and led to much political finger-pointing. What caused the disaster is still being investigated by authorities.
Mgcini Tshwaku, a local government official, said there were indications that people lit fires inside the building to keep warm in the winter cold. Officials are looking into the cause of the blaze.
By midmorning, the fire had been extinguished and firefighters were combing the structure floor by floor, searching for bodies. The emergency services said that at least 12 children were dead.
It is one of the deadliest residential fires in recent years. The toll already exceeds that of the 2017 fire at Grenfell Tower in London, which claimed 72 lives.
A fire broke out in a blackened building where black workers were staying at a ‘hijacked building’ in Johannesburg’s Central Business District
The New York Times journalists visited the building for an article in May about the state of South Africa. The garbage was piled out of windows on the second floor, and the building was so overcrowded that some people had built shacks in the back lot.
The building used to be an apartheid checkpoint for Black workers and the city owned it, according to the mayor. He said that the city leased the site in the last few years to an organization that provides emergency housing for women, but that the organization ended their operations after a few years.
After the fire was extinguished, smoke seeped out of windows of the blackened building as daylight broke. Strings of sheets and other material hung out of some of the broken windows. It wasn’t clear if those items had been used to try and escape the fire or if they had been used to save their possessions.
A witness told eNCA that when the fire started, he heard people screaming for help and shouting “We’re dying in here.”
Another 43 people were injured in the blaze, which broke out at about 1 a.m. 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.”
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Mulaudzi believes that the death toll will increase and more people are trapped inside the building. The fire took three hours to put out, and firefighters only got to work through three floors by mid-morning.
Inside, the haphazardly partitioned buildings have broken windows, dark stairwells, piles of garbage and sewage, and people’s few belongings — a dirty mattress, a cooking pot.
She said she paid the guys who took over the building about $60 a month to live in it. For that she lived in a makeshift shack erected within the building with her two children and boyfriend.
A Zimbabwean, Ndlovu is, like many of the fire’s victims, a migrant from a poorer African country who came to Johannesburg — often dubbed “The City of Gold” — looking for a better life but encountering crime and xenophobia.
With unemployment in a country where it is likely to be much higher than in the world, people desperate for housing have settled in squalid conditions in multi-storey buildings forced to pay rent to criminal gangs.
Even though big corporations have relocated out to the safer suburbs and abandoned abandoned office spaces that have now become “hijacked,” the building that caught on fire was still called the Central Business District.
For some privacy many living in buildings like this use bits of wood, curtains and cardboard to divide their space — all highly flammable materials, especially when many residents cook on fires in large metal drums or use candles when the illegal electricity connection attached to the squat fails.
Some residents and officials have thought that candles might have been the cause of the fire. South Africa is in the midst of a power crisis and there was a complete power cut, residents said.
Ndlovu, who ekes out a living selling snacks on the street, told NPR she had “lost everything” in the fire. She said she and her children only survived because they were staying at her sister’s house.
Source: With Johannesburg’s building fire, the misery of gang-hijacked towers comes into focus
The Johannesburg Building Fire, the Miserry of Giant Gangs Comes into Focus: Source: [With Johannesburg’s building fire, amidst the misery of gang-hijacked towers]
“When I see today happening this thing, I think God was the one moving me there,” she said. I can see. the other lady lose the child and the other child is in hospital.”
Mthunseng Maimane of the neighboring apartment block complains that criminal elements in such hijacked buildings are causing high crime rates in the city.
I fear for my children. She added that there are drug gangs and crystal meth users in the abandoned tower blocks.
The head of the department of human settlement said the fire demonstrates a chronic problem of housing in the province and there is at least 1.2 million people who need housing.
“There are cartels who prey on who are vulnerable people. He stated that most of the buildings were in the hands of people who collect rental from the people.
The building that burned this week, which may have housed as many as 200 families, is part of South Africa’s dark past.
Source: With Johannesburg’s building fire, the misery of gang-hijacked towers comes into focus
Where to move? The crisis of Thursday’s fire in South Africa: how many rands have been wasted in building construction, and how much will the government spend?
The country’s strong anti-eviction laws make it difficult to remove people from a building once they’ve occupied it. Though nongovernmental organizations say these are essential to protecting the dispossessed. Where to move them to is also a question.
The tragic deaths of five people at a house in the city were awake-up call to the affordable housing crisis, according to the president.
However, opposition groups say the government has known about and neglected the problem for years. They say billions of rands have been lost to corruption over the years that could instead have been used to build housing for the poor.
It is cold comfort for those who have been displaced by Thursday’s fire and for the many South Africans and foreign migrants who live in the remaining hijacked buildings waiting to be affected by another disaster.