Johannesburg Mayor Herman Mashaba, has reiterated that buildings that are not compliant with safety standards, must be demolished and rebuilt.
This follows a blaze that ripped through the Bank of Lisbon building in the Johannesburg CBD on Wednesday. Three fire-fighters died in attempts to extinguish the blaze.
The fire, which reignited Thursday night, has been extinguished. There’ve been concerns about the building which housed three Gauteng Departments and its failure to adhere to safety regulations.
Mashaba says, “I had to set up a special unit to do raids on buildings. Two weeks ago, there was the first court order to demolish a building. We do raids basically on a daily basis but this one is more concerning for me because this is a government building. So imagine if I had conducted a raid on this building, politically it would have caused havoc because they would say Mashaba has got a political agenda. We now are sitting with hundreds of buildings in the city of Joburg that are in worse conditions that this one.”
Meanwhile Johannesburg Emergency Services say the fire that broke out at the Lisbon Building fire in the CBD did not spread to other buildings.
Students residing at the nearby Waldorf building who were evacuated on Friday as a precaution have been allowed back into their rooms.
Emergency Services spokesperson, Nana Radebe, says the fire which reignited on Thursday night has been extinguished.
“The fire has been completely extinguished. Last night we just had smoke around 7PM. But teams went back in and around 10PM there was no smoke and the fire was completely extinguished. We have two teams stationed there just to ensure that when it reignites we have a team on standby. We did not have any fire across the road,” says Radebe.
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