Johannesburg, with a severe shortage of affordable housing, has hundreds of illegally occupied derelict buildings that officials and housing advocates say have become firetraps.
They arrived in desperation, unable to find anything better, safer or cheaper in a city with a severe shortage of affordable housing. They settled in a trash-choked building owned and neglected by the city of Johannesburg, paying “rent” to criminals.
Hundreds of people lived there, and on Thursday morning, at least 74 died there, including at least 12 children, in one of the worst residential fires in South Africa’s history. Flames devoured a structure that overcrowding, security gates, mounds of garbage and flimsy subdividing had turned into a death trap. Some victims leaped from upper windows of the five-story building rather than burn to death.
The disaster came as no surprise to residents, housing advocates or officials of a city that has more than 600 derelict, illegally occupied structures — all but about 30 of them privately owned — according to Mgcini Tshwaku, a city councilman who oversees public safety.
The buildings are home to untold thousands of South Africans suffering from a shortage of housing and jobs, and to migrants from other countries who come searching for opportunity, only to find a nation enduring its own economic crisis. And these urban squatter camps are routinely “hijacked,” residents say, by organized groups demanding payment.
Distraught people milled through the crowd gathered around the building in the downtown area, and went from hospital to hospital, searching for loved ones or anyone who might have scraps of information. Officials said at least 61 survivors were treated at several hospitals.
Looking for her missing brother, Kenneth Sihle Dube, Ethel Jack gazed up at his fourth-floor window, hoping that the dishes she could see still stacked there meant that his corner of the building had not been devastated. She saw bodies covered in foil blankets lined up in the street and spotted her brother’s neighbor, her face burned, shaken and crying.
“I’m just praying he jumped from the window and didn’t die,” Ms. Jack said. He turned up, alive, at a hospital east of the city.
Many of the dead were burned beyond recognition and would have to be identified through genetic testing, officials said. Nomantu Nkomo-Ralehoko, a local health official, told reporters that of those identified so far, two were from Malawi, two from Tanzania and at least two more from South Africa.