Seventeen people, including three children, have died in a slum near Johannesburg after a gas leak believed to have come from illegal miners’ gas cylinders.
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The incident took place Wednesday night in this so-called “informal” neighborhood of Boksburg, nestled among brick and corrugated iron shacks at the base of an abandoned mine.
On Thursday, Provincial Prime Minister Panyaza Lesufi announced at the scene that one of the wounded people being transported by the emergency services died in hospital in the morning, adding to the 16 deaths previously recorded overnight.
Eleven people remain hospitalized, some in a worrying condition, he said.
“There were corpses scattered everywhere,” he told the press, recalling that the emergency services, who were alarmed at around 8 p.m. on Wednesday, initially assumed an explosion. “People tried to flee but they started collapsing before they could reach a safe area,” he continued, describing “heartbreaking scenes.”
Rescuers found a bottle of nitrate oxide, a poisonous gas, at the scene of the accident.
President Cyril Ramaphosa, who was traveling in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, expressed in a press release “his deep sadness at the devastating and tragic loss of innocent lives” and called on investigators to “shed light on the causes of the accident”.
“Illegal Miners”
Visibly shocked and angry neighbors watched the non-stop ballet of investigators and forensic technicians between the barracks along a dirt road from dawn Thursday.
Felsin Nyamuso fell out of bed, worried about her sister who lived nearby. “My sister was hospitalized but my brother-in-law died,” she told AFP, eyes red. Before leaving, she checks that the house is properly locked.
According to the first findings, it was “illegal mining activities that took place here,” said the spokesman for the community, Zweli Dlamini, also on site.
Since the early morning, the police have been fetching large gas bottles from what appear to be workshops. They “continue to remove equipment and dismantle illegal processing plants that have been set up here,” Dlamini continued.
“To separate the gold from the ore, the process requires the use of extremely hazardous chemicals,” and particularly gases, mining recovery specialist Samantha Hargreaves told AFP.
South Africa is plagued by endemic unemployment and has thousands of illegal miners, nicknamed “zama zamas” (those who keep trying) in the Zulu language.
These men usually descend into abandoned mines at night, because they are often not profitable enough, and try to mine the remains of precious metals, stones or even coal.
The first opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), pointed the finger at the government’s “failure to fight illegal mining in Gauteng province,” the country’s most populous province, which houses the capital Pretoria and Johannesburg united.
Boksburg, a middle-class suburb of Johannesburg, was hit by a magnitude 5 earthquake last month, believed to have been caused by Gruyere cheese from tunnels and shafts linked to mining activities in the area.
A gas tanker also exploded in Boksburg on Christmas Eve, killing 41 people.