Johannesburg fire updates: More than 70 dead in South Africa building blaze

South Africa’s ruling African National Congress party says it is “saddened by the tragic loss of life” in Johannesburg.

“We urge law enforcement authorities to ensure that those responsible for this tragedy are held accountable,” it said in a post on X.

ANC SADDENED BY THE TRAGIC LOSS OF LIFE IN THE JOHANNESBURG CBD pic.twitter.com/3WJ7Wp9uXs

— African National Congress (@MYANC) August 31, 2023

Nkateko Mabasa, reporting for Al Jazeera from the scene of the fire, spoke to Elis Daras, a Malawian expat living in South Africa.

Daras received a phone call from friends at around 8am (06:00 GMT) on Thursday, informing her of a fire at a building where her husband, Solomon Daras lived.

The 37-year-old immediately rushed to the scene from Mayfair, a suburb west of the city, but has not heard any news about her husband since arriving outside the gutted building.

It has left her wondering if her husband is one of the 73 people who have been reported dead so far, or amongst the 52 injured.

“I haven’t heard anything about Solomon. We don’t know whether he is dead or at the hospital”.

While emergency services officials conducted their search of the building, Elis and a group of women waited on a pavement two streets away from the scene.

Johannesburg is one of the world’s most unequal cities with widespread poverty, joblessness and a housing crisis.

It has about 15,000 unhoused people, according to the Gauteng provincial government.

Lebogang Isaac Maile, the head of Gauteng’s Department of Human Settlements, said some of the victims of the fire may have been renting from criminal gangs illegally collecting fees.

“There are cartels who prey on who are vulnerable people. Because some of these buildings, if not most of them, are actually in the hands of those cartels who collect rent from the people,” he told reporters at the scene.

Maile said the fire “demonstrates a chronic problem of housing in our province as we’ve previously said that there’s at least 1.2 million people who need housing.”

A sign on the entrance to the gutted block shows it was a heritage building of South Africa’s apartheid past, where Black South Africans came to collect their “dompas” – documents that would enable them to work in white-owned areas of the city.

The spokesperson for Johannesburg’s mayor has told Al Jazeera that the city administration is aware that many such “hijacked” buildings exist and are rented out.

“This particular building was previously acted upon by the city’s forensic and investigation services, [with] cases opened with the South African Police Service (SAPS) against those people who are identified as the criminal landlords,” spokesperson Mlimandlela Ndamase told Al Jazeera’s Fahmida Miller.

Ndamase said it was then the police’s responsibility to “ensure that they investigate and bring those people to court”.

The city owns about 30 buildings in a similar state and under similar conditions, while more than 100 are owned by private individuals and the private sector, he added.

According to reports in local media, Usindiso, the building that caught fire, is owned by the city of Johannesburg and was leased to a nongovernmental organisation that supports unhoused people.

Local reports said the building had since been “hijacked” by illegal landlords who rent rooms to people on an informal basis.

“This is an abandoned building, one that was hijacked and taken over by informal landlords,” Al Jazeera’s Miller reported from Johannesburg.

She said witnesses told her there were dozens of rooms on each floor with “about five people in each room”.

“So it really was overcrowded.”

Mgcini Tshwaku, a member of Johannesburg city’s mayoral committee in charge of public safety, has said candles used for lighting inside the structure were a likely cause of fire.

He also indicated that the building’s main security gate was closed, making it difficult for residents to escape.

“Inside the building itself there was a (security) gate which was closed so people couldn’t get out,” said Tshwaku.

“Many burned bodies were found stashed at that gate.”

Authorities estimated more than “80 shacks” were set up inside.

“The fire spread very quickly affecting different levels of the building because of the combustible materials used,” said emergency services official Mulaudzi.

Building resident Gift tells Al Jazeera that he saw people “jumping off the windows” to escape the blaze.

“It was difficult for them to escape the fire,” he said, adding that he believes the blaze started on the ground floor of the building and spread upwards, making it difficult for those on the upper floors to get away.

Fellow resident Karabo said the “highly populated” building was inhabited by locals as well as foreigners.

“There were illegal electricity connections, and water conditions were not that good,” he told Al Jazeera’s Johannesburg correspondent outside the building.

“There were a lot people from Malawi [on the lower floors], so when [the time] came for escaping, it was bad [for them]. … I feel it was the foreigners who died more.”

Residents Karabo and Gift live in the same building that burned, but used a separate entrance to access it.

“We were actually in the other section, asleep around 4am, when we heard people screaming, ‘Fire! Fire! Fire! Emergency!’ Then we went out of the building and saw that there was a fire,” they told Al Jazeera’s Miller.

“People were rushing out, coming out of the windows,” they said.

Treasure-Lee Shuping has been waiting for hours to hear news about her daughter who lived inside the building – but is unsure whether she’s alive.

“I’ve been here since before 7am, and we still haven’t gotten any updates as to what is happening,” she told Al Jazeera’s Fahmida Miller.

“We have just been told that people have been evacuated, bodies are still being recovered, and the death toll is rising,” she said, adding that the suspense is “killing” her.

“I don’t know if my daughter is alive. I can only hope for her to be alive.”

A resident of the building that caught fire said “it just happened all of a sudden” but he didn’t want to panic.

“We saw smoke coming into the house … we had to make a plan,” he told local broadcaster Newzroom Afrika.

“I decided to take the curtains, our house curtains, and tie them on the window bar so my siblings could climb down.”

The 23-year-old lived with his three siblings – aged 16, 13 and nine – that he looked after.

“This place is our home, it’s where we stay,” he said. “We lost a lot of things, clothes, essential things to us that are gone. But in this type of situation we have to save ourselves.”

The number of fatalities has risen to 73, according to a post by the City of Johannesburg on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

The official account said the number of injured was now 52, as emergency services continued their search and recovery operation inside the building.

#JoburgUpdates The number of fatalities has risen to 73 and 52 injured . @CityofJoburgEMS still continuing with search and recovery operation #JoburgCares #JHBfire #JoburgFire ^NB https://t.co/mAHROfR5JS

— City of Joburg (@CityofJoburgZA) August 31, 2023

The fire, which broke out in the early hours of Thursday, took place in a building in central Johannesburg’s Marshalltown.

Once a hub for big businesses in Africa’s wealthiest city, Johannesburg’s inner city area has largely fallen into disrepair in the decades since the end of South Africa’s apartheid.

Many big companies have since fled to other areas.

Now, the inner city is home to tens of thousands of people, including refugees and migrants from across the African continent.

Many move to Johannesburg in search of better opportunities. But those without means are often forced to live in less than ideal conditions, including in informal settlements or buildings that have officially been “abandoned”.

Mgcini Tshwaku, a local government official, said there were indications that people lit fires inside the building to keep warm in the winter cold.

After the fire was extinguished, smoke seeped out of windows of the blackened building as daylight broke, AP reported.

Strings of sheets and other material hung out of some of the broken windows. It was not clear if people had used those items to try and escape the fire or if they were trying to save their possessions.

Johannesburg emergency services official Mulaudzi said shacks and other makeshift structures had been set up inside the building and people were crammed into rooms.

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, he added.

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.

Search teams found 64 bodies, and the chance of anyone being found alive hours after the fire broke out was “very slim”, he said.

“Over 20 years in the service, I’ve never come across something like this,” Mulaudzi said.

Of the 64 people reported to have died so far, seven were children with the youngest being a one-year-old, according to emergency services officials.

Local witnesses told the Associated Press that as many as 200 people may have been living in the building.

A witness who didn’t give his name told local television channel eNCA that he lived in a building next door and heard people screaming for help and shouting “We’re dying in here” when the fire started.

Some of the people living in the building that caught fire threw themselves out of windows to escape the blaze and might have died because of that, a local government official told the Associated Press news agency.

Abandoned and broken-down buildings in the area are common and often taken over by crime syndicates, who then rent rooms to people desperately seeking some form of accommodation in the populous economic heart of South Africa.

According to EMS official Mulaudzi, once emergency service officials have completed their search and recovery operations, South African police will take over and begin their investigations.

“At this stage, we don’t know what might be the cause of the fire but looking at the environment inside, it’s an informal settlement inside a building,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Therefore the risk of people being trapped inside the building is very much high. Hence you will find that we have got a lot of fatalities in this incident.”