The investigation into an apartment block fire that claimed 76 lives in August in South Africa, the richest city in Africa, has begun on Thursday. The incident exposed severe issues of poverty and neglect in certain areas of the city.
Many of the hundreds of residents in the Marshalltown neighbourhood of Johannesburg were forced to live in extremely cramped conditions when the overnight fire tore through a five-story structure.
It was thought that the building was one of the Johannesburg “hijacked” buildings. Authorities believe it was taken over by unlicensed landlords who were renting out apartments to impoverished South Africans and foreigners who were in dire need of a place to live.
In the first statement of the investigation, acting chief of Johannesburg Emergency Services Rapulane Monageng stated that firemen could not find a fire extinguisher anywhere in the structure. He claimed that they had all been removed from the walls. He also testified that a big fire hose had been taken out and its water supply piped converted for “domestic use.”
There was only one route in and out of the building, he added, with the doors to the main fire escape of the building chained shut and other emergency exits secured. People were living in the toilets, hallways and stairwells of the building, which was filled with tiny living spaces divided by plywood and other extremely combustible materials.
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“It was mind-boggling that [people] even took a bathroom and converted it into a bedroom,” Monageng stated.
He claimed that the wood used for shacks and partitions, along with the cramped conditions, created a very serious fire threat.
He described it as a “ticking time bomb.”
In the days following the fire in the early hours of August 31, police proclaimed the building to be a crime scene and launched a criminal case; however, no one has been legally charged in connection with one of the deadliest urban fires in South Africa.
It was also discovered that although the city owned the building, it was not under its jurisdiction and that the authorities had practically abandoned it.
Early in September, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa made the inquiry public. A three-person team led by retired Constitutional Court judge Justice Sisi Khampepe is in charge of it. Their goal is to determine what caused the fire and whether anyone should be held accountable for the 76 fatalities, which included at least 12 children.
Over eighty people were hurt, many of them from jumping out of the building’s windows to escape the fire, breaking their backs and limbs in the process.
Two months after the fire, the remains of 33 out of the 76 fatalities are still in a Johannesburg mortuary and have not been claimed by family members, according to a provincial health department spokeswoman who provided a statement to The Associated Press on Thursday.
