A nighttime fire ripped through a rundown five-story building in Johannesburg that was occupied by homeless people and squatters, killing at least 73 people early Thursday, 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 to escape the fire and might have died then, a local government official said. Seven of the victims were children, the youngest a 1-year-old, according to an emergency services spokesperson.Emergency crews expected to find more victims as they worked their way through the building, a process slowed by the conditions inside.
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.” 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 the deadly blaze and which hindered emergency crews trying to work through the site, according to Mulaudzi.
City officials said 141 families were affected by the tragedy, although they were not able to immediately say how many people were in the building at the time of the blaze. Many of them were believed to be foreign nationals, officials said.
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