March 29, 2006
By Ndaba Dlamini and Tammy O'Reilly
TWELVE people died when a fire broke out in a derelict building in the city centre in the early hours of Wednesday, 29 March.
Among the dead were eight men and four women, mostly from Malawi, said Malcolm Midgley, the spokesman for the City's emergency management services (EMS).
About 33 people were injured, he said. The fire was in a building that used to be a factory at the corner of Commissioner and Nugget streets, in the inner city.
"We received a call at 1am and it took us about 40 minutes to put out the fire," Midgley added.
The EMS was able to evacuate some of the people and save some possessions. Midgley said the building had no proper sanitary facilities or electricity. The cause of the deaths appeared to have been "traumatic asphyxia" or suffocation.
The two-storey building was extensively damaged. "We found about 150 beds in the building. It is difficult to say at the moment whether these people were living in the building legally."
Witnesses say the fire, the cause of which is not yet known, started about 1am at the far end of the warehouse by a generator that contained petrol.
According to resident Steve Ndlovu, there were up to 200 people - mostly adults - living there. "We paid rent but I don't know who the landlord is," he said. "We thought the place was safe but today some of my friends are dead."
It appears that people rushed for the door, unable to get out, and residents were trampled in the chaos. A passing tow truck driver who saw the fire managed to hook a chain from his truck to the outside of the door and open it.
The City of Johannesburg, the emergency services and a number of non-governmental organisations are arranging temporary accommodation for those affected by the fire. Shaun O'Shea, the marketing manager of Region 8, the region in which the inner city falls, expressed his and the region's sympathies to the families.
"The work of the Inner City Task Force in the past years has been to go to court on a regular basis to avoid such occurrences. A collective effort has been under way to get court orders to evacuate squatters living in hazardous buildings."
The Inner City Task Force was formed by the City to deal with the issues of urban decay through by-law enforcement, building control, land use, the environment and health. One of its tasks was a drive to evacuate people from derelict buildings for safety and environmental reasons.
However, efforts to evacuate people who had invaded derelict buildings were put on hold by a court order passed in February. It ruled against any evictions of families consisting of parents and children from such buildings if the City had no alternative accommodation to offer them.
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