A fire that ripped through a five-storey derelict building in downtown Johannesburg occupied by homeless people has killed at least 74, including 12 children.
The fire broke out in the early hours of Thursday in a government-owned building in South Africa’s economic capital, which was said to have as many as 200 families living in makeshift dwellings on each floor.
Emergency services said a further 52 were injured in the incident, as many people were forced to jump from second- and third-storey windows to escape the inferno.
City manager Floyd Brink called the tragedy “unprecedented” for Johannesburg, in terms of lives lost in a fire. Many of the victims were undocumented migrants from across Africa.
Local news reports quoted witnesses as saying the fire was started by a candle lit during one of the daily rolling electricity blackouts that South Africans have been forced to endure over the past couple of years. Forensic specialists arrived on the scene on Thursday afternoon as firefighters continued to search through the debris and secure the building, with many people still unaccounted for.
Mr Brink said there were no preliminary reports available yet on what caused the blaze. Earlier on Thursday officials confirmed the building was owned by the city and that it had been declared unsafe in recent years and closed. However, they said, it had subsequently been “hijacked” a term used in South Africa to refer to buildings illegally taken over by inner-city crime syndicates that rent out spaces to the homeless that are unfit for habitation.
All Mr Brink would say about the property was the city had conducted a raid on it in 2019, that 140 foreign nationals had been arrested for illegally collecting rent from residents, and that the case was now with the police.
Johannesburg Emergency Management Services spokesman Robert Mulaudzi said the fire had started at about 1.30am and that firefighters had evacuated the buildingon their arrival, while also trying to tackle the blaze.
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“Every floor has an informal settlement, and those that were trying to evacuate were trapped because of the structures between the floors,” he said to reporters. Mr Mulaudzi said they were informing people arriving at the scene to look for relatives “that chances of finding them alive are very slim”.
The site of the fire started out as a government building used to control the movement of black people during the apartheid era. But after the transition to democracy in 1994, officials said a non-governmental organisation had taken it over to run it as a shelter for vulnerable women and children.
The Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa, a human rights campaign group, said the building had operated as a shelter but that its neglected state – “which resulted in it falling into disrepair and its eventual hijacking” – was the municipality’s fault. “To shift the blame to NGOs, as people speaking for the city are currently doing, speaks to the municipality’s unwillingness to take responsibility for the inner-city housing crisis,” the organisation said.
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Over the past 15 years the Johannesburg central business district has become increasingly rundown with hundreds of its buildings falling into a state of disrepair, including the one at the heart of Thursday’s fire. The Daily Maverick, an online news publication, said the Johannesburg Property Owners and Managers Association had identified the building as one of 57 that had been illegally occupied in the city.
