Seventeen people died on Wednesday night in Angelo, an informal settlement in Boksburg on the eastern edge of Johannesburg, after toxic nitrate gas leaked from a cylinder. Authorities blamed an illegal gold processing operation. Three of the dead were children, aged one, six and 15, police said.
At least 10 people went to hospital. Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi, who gave an update on Thursday, said they included a two-month-old baby, two four-year-olds and a nine-year-old.
Emergency services spokesman William Ntladi said the victims breathed in gas that escaped from a cylinder stored in a shack where illegal miners were separating gold from rock and dirt. The leak emptied the canister. Lesufi posted videos on Twitter showing the dusty inside of the shack and at least four cylinders on metal stands, with the one that leaked lying on the floor by the entrance.
Bodies stayed where they fell for hours, some under sheets or blankets, while responders waited for forensic investigators and pathologists. Search teams combed an area stretching 100 metres from the cylinder and kept going deep into the night. The alleys between the shacks were dark, with no streetlights.
“It’s not a nice scene at all. It’s painful, emotionally draining and tragic,” Lesufi said as he visited the settlement.
Police removed canisters from the cluster of shacks and sifted through evidence, then began tearing down the shack. Lesufi said every gas cylinder was taken from the site. Police opened a criminal case. Authorities did not say whether the people running the gold processing were among the dead.
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s office called it a “devastating and tragic loss of innocent lives.”
A common danger around Johannesburg
Illegal mining is rife in the gold-rich areas around the city. Miners enter closed or disused mines to look for leftover gold, then try to process some of it in secret, often in makeshift and dangerous workshops.
Underground deaths are common too. The mining department announced recently that at least 31 illegal miners were believed to have died in May in a gas explosion in a disused mine in Welkom, in central South Africa. It said methane caused that blast.
