About 40 kilometers east of Johannesburg, sixteen people, including children, were killed on Wednesday evening after a gas leak in a Boksburg slum, we learned from the emergency services, which revised the balance sheet downwards overnight.
“We have confirmed the deaths of sixteen people at the scene,” eight men, five women and three children, emergency services spokesman William Ntladi told AFP, adding that sixteen others were injured.
“The intervention of the paramedics made it possible to resuscitate other people who were taken to the hospital”, he added, without further explanation on this revised death toll at sixteen, hours after an initial announcement by the authorities. of “at least twenty-four dead”.
Of the injured, “four are hospitalized in critical condition, eleven are stable” and the last, a minor, “is now fully conscious,” he said.
Called around 8 p.m., initially to what appeared to be an explosion, emergency services found it to be a gas leak. A bottle of nitrate oxide was found at the scene.
“When we arrived, we saw dozens of people lying all over the area due to inhaling this poisonous gas,” the spokesperson said.
A leak from this cylinder would have poisoned them, according to the first elements of the investigation. “It would be a gas leak from a bottle, which would be nitrate oxide, a very toxic gas which affected the inhabitants of this informal district of Boksburg”, explained William Ntladi.
“Preliminary information indicates that these people were using this gas in illegal mining activities,” he told AFP. Apparently the underground miners used the gas to extract gold from the ground. »
The rescuers and then the forensic police patrolled the entire affected area late at night, a bric-a-brac of miserable brick and corrugated iron cabins, noted AFP journalists on the spot. The slum is located at the foot of an old abandoned mine.
During the night, neighbors gathered around a fire to watch the ballet of police and scientists in uniform.
Plagued by rampant unemployment, South Africa is home to thousands of illegal miners nicknamed “zama zamas”, who often live in squats.
Those “who try and try again”, in the Zulu language, go down into abandoned mines because they are often no longer profitable enough and try to extract what is left of precious metals, stones or even coal.
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 activity in the area.
The earthquake, felt as far away as the South African economic capital and which occurred in the middle of the night ten kilometers below the surface of the earth, caused no casualties.
It was in Boksburg again that a gas tanker exploded on Christmas Eve, killing 41 people in all.
Amateur videos had shown the explosion of a huge ball of fire under a bridge, adjoining a hospital. The truck, probably too high to pass there, was filled with 60,000 liters of LPG gas.