(Johannesburg) Sixteen people, including children, died on Wednesday evening after a gas leak in a slum of Boksburg, about forty kilometers east of Johannesburg, we learned from the services of emergency, which revised the balance sheet downwards overnight.
“We have confirmed the death of 16 people on the spot”, eight men, five women and three children, said the spokesman for the emergency services William Ntladi, adding that 16 others had been 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 toll of 16 dead, a few hours after an initial announcement from the authorities. of “at least 24 dead”.
Among the injured, “four are hospitalized in critical condition, 11 are stable” and the last, a minor, “is now fully conscious”, he detailed.
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 the inhalation of this toxic gas,” said the spokesman.
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 the context of illegal mining activities,” he said. “Apparently the underground miners were using the gas to extract the gold from the ground.”
Grid perimeter
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 endemic unemployment, South Africa has 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 not 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.