At least 73 people, including seven children, have died in a fire in a multi-storey building in the centre of Johannesburg, South Africa’s biggest city, emergency services have said.
In one of the country’s worst such tragedies in living memory, emergency management services said a further 43 people had been injured in the blaze, which broke out early on Thursday.
People had been evacuated from the building, and an emergency services spokesperson said a search and recovery operation was under way. It was likely the death toll would rise, Robert Mulaudzi said, and it was not immediately clear what caused the blaze. As of midday on Thursday, authorities had yet to count the casualties on the top two floors of the five-storey building.
“Over 20 years in the service, I’ve never come across something like this,” Mulaudzi said.
There was an “informal settlement” inside the building, Mulaudzi said. “So there [are] a lot of informal structures inside the building. There is a lot of debris that we have to remove.”
Credit: theguardian.com
