At least 16 people, including children, were killed in a gas leak in a South African slum near Johannesburg on Thursday, according to emergency officials, who revised the death toll after some individuals were resuscitated.
The Wednesday night accident is believed to have been caused by illicit mining activities in the Angelo informal settlement near the town of Boksburg, east of Johannesburg.
“We have got 16 on scene now that are confirmed dead, and the intervention of paramedics managed to revive some others and they were taken to hospital,” emergency services spokesman William Ntladi told AFP from the scene.
Of those in hospital, four are in “critical” condition while 11 are in “serious but stable” condition, he said. One, who he described as a minor, was fully conscious, he added.
Five ladies and three children were killed.
Ntladi said emergency services received a complaint about a gas explosion about 8 p.m. (1800 GMT), but when they arrived, they discovered it was “a gas leakage from a cylinder” holding a “poisonous gas.”
“Due to the scene still unfolding we are busy checking the entire area affected to ascertain numbers of hospitalised casualties,” he said earlier.
Preliminary information suggests the gas was being used “as part of illegal mining activities,” he added.
With a dizzying unemployment rate of more than 32 percent, South Africa is home to thousands of illegal miners nicknamed “zama zamas” which means “those who try their luck” in Zulu.
Thousands of unlicensed miners hunt for gold in abandoned mines under difficult and frequently deadly conditions.
Johannesburg and its neighboring areas are constructed around towering heaps of soil and vast pits left behind by decades of mining corporations that began extracting during the 1880s gold rush.
Last month, a 5.0 magnitude earthquake shook Boksburg, a middle-class Johannesburg neighborhood, and is likely to have been caused by the network of underground tunnels and shafts associated with illicit mining in the area.
The same suburb was also the site of a major gas tanker explosion on Christmas Eve, which killed 41 people when a vehicle carrying liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) became stuck beneath a bridge, causing a leak and blast.
People and medics who had arrived at the scene to help or view the stuck truck were among those killed.
Dozens of people at a neighboring hospital, including patients and employees, were seriously burned as a result of the explosion, which shattered windows and caused the roof to collapse.
