People were illegally constructing homes or occupying buildings 'willy-nilly'
City of Johannesburg speaker Colleen Makhubele told media on Thursday morning that the dozens of people who died or were injured in the fire that ripped through a city-owned building in Marshalltown overnight, had been contravening by-laws.
“[The fire] is a tragedy and we are saddened by it, I don’t care if the [occupants] were illegal foreigners or not,” she also told journalists. The buildings are most often without domestic and/or fire water lines or electricity, and as a result, occupants bathe, defecate and do open fire cooking in rooms and dump refuse in open areas. They also connect electricity illegally, a known fire risk.
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