At least 70 people have been killed in a fire at a five-storey building in Johannesburg’s central business district, emergency services officials say.
Building was ‘highly populated’, locals say
“It was difficult for them to escape the fire,” he said, adding that the blaze started on the ground floor of the building and spread upwards, making it difficult for the people on the upper floors to get away.
Karabo said the “highly populated” building was inhabited by 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, so when [the time] came for escaping, it was bad [for them]. … I feel it was the foreigners who died more.”
‘People were coming out of the windows’
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.
‘I don’t know if my daughter is alive’
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.
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.