The South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa will be conducting a site visit to Marshalltown, Johannesburg where fire outage claimed 71 lives on Thursday.
This was disclosed through the Presidency social media platforms on Thursday, while at the incident site the President will receive briefing on emergency, recovery operations and on the support the government is providing to the affected families.
Ramaphosa who supposed to address the nation on the outcomes of the 15th BRICS Summit and on the outcome of the panel investigation into the docking of the Lady R vessel in South Africa, cancelled it to attend to the fire disaster in Johannesburg.
Report has it that 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
Adding that another 52 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.
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, authorities said. Seven of the victims were children, the youngest a 1-year-old, according to emergency services.
Emergency crews expected to find more victims as they worked their way through the building, a process slowed by the conditions inside. Dozens of bodies were lined up on a nearby side road, some in body bags, and others were covered with silver sheets and blankets.
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.”
Mulaudzi said the death toll was likely to increase and more bodies were likely trapped inside the building. 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.
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.