Emergency personnel found similar circumstances when they responded to a fire at a hijacked building on Commissioner Street on Sunday morning as they struggled to gain access to the building which had shacks inside.

Two people died and a woman accused of starting the fire following a domestic feud has since been arrested and charged with murder.

Gauteng police spokesperson Col Dimakatso Nevhuhulwi said a 30-year-old woman was arrested and is expected to appear in the Johannesburg magistrate’s court on a charge of murder on Monday the 22nd of January 2024.

EMS spokesperson Nana Radebe-Kgiba added that most of the buildings that they have responded to in the recent past are not implementing safety regulations and most have informal settlements inside in which they use combustible material and the fires easily spread to other floors.

“With the fire that happened today, there are shacks inside the building, there are planks and people were on the balcony and going in and out from the building is very difficult because there is a small passage for entrance and exits," Radebe-Kgiba reiterated.

Meanwhile, the office of the mayor Kabelo Gwamanda on Sunday said it had obtained six orders to evacuate occupants of unsafe buildings since the deadly fire at Usindiso Building in August 2023 when 77 people lost their lives.

“Each building has its own case number and as such the orders are building-specific, what this means is that this allows the city to start a process of evacuating some of these buildings in the interest of the safety of the inhabitants," Gwamanda’s spokesperson Mlimandeli Ndamase said.