On Wednesday evening Johannesburg city manager Floyd Brink was on his way home to Roodepoort when messages and videos started streaming in about an explosion in the city centre.
“I made a U-turn and rushed to the scene where I found our chief of police and many other colleagues trying to gain control of the scene,” he told the Sunday Times.
“I have slept six or seven hours since Wednesday evening and I don’t plan to start now. We have a crisis to negotiate.”
As for the source of the explosion, Brink says the investigation is ongoing.
“As our technical team told us, this was definitely a gas explosion. Our biggest job now is to trace the source of the explosion.
“The technical teams and our emergency services people are using leakage detection equipment to search for the source. A lot of this work has already been done,” Brink said.
“We know Egoli Gas has a pipe running in the area where the explosion happened. They have shut that pipe down.”
But Egoli's is not the only underground gas line in the area. On Friday, another one — which was probably used to feed the Egoli lines some years ago — was discovered.
“The team is going back to test the old line to see if it is still active and what is happening there.”
It was reported earlier that Egoli Gas found its system to be intact except for a small leak “not big enough to cause the explosion”.
“It is difficult at present. There is an issue of liability for them or for us. We are working very closely with them, and we don’t want this crisis to turn into an exercise of blame-shifting," Brink said.
“All parties know this is a disaster, there is no time for turf issues or playing the blame game.”
The next step is clearing the area around the explosion.
“Until we can remove the rubble underground, we cannot declare the area safe."
Once that happens, the real work will begin.
“We will start doing rubble removal. Even this is more difficult than people expect. You cannot just go there with excavators and other heavy equipment. Their weight can cause a collapse or something even worse that we don’t even want to think about.”
The work will have to be done by hand.
“It is very difficult now to even start looking at a possible time frame for the project. This will only be possible once the area has been declared safe."
He said a team had been deployed to fence off the area.
“The disaster area will soon be a construction site. It needs boarding and gates so the area can be kept isolated and safe.
“The buildings to all indications are safe. To determine this, several different experts were used — outsourced people as well as our own structural and civil engineers. They looked at the distance from the point of collapse to the foundations as well as the tolerance for any movement. That calculation is a scientific formula that then indicated to us that everything is fine,” Brink said.
The work is continuing nonstop.
“We have our own buildings control officer for Joburg. [The team is] going into those buildings at the moment, and not just to do a box-ticking exercise. They are moving from floor to floor in the buildings to ensure they are structurally sound. So it’s our building control officer through development planning, environmental health, a team of technical experts and so forth. A lot of our people are involved."
Modern tech is helping.
“We are now using drones in the tunnels. With the drones we could even see a certain part of the road where the crack is visible from underground. If you look at that portion of the road there is no crack visible in the blacktop. We saw that some City Power infrastructure was damaged."
The ripple effect of the explosion is massive.
“Some of the informal traders will be affected. We will have SMME-related issues. Some of the shops are closed. That means a loss of income for a lot of people.
“This is not something we can approach on our own. We will only be successful through partnerships with entities such as the business forums, the JCCI [Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce and Industry], Japoma [Johannesburg Property Owners and Managers Association], building owners and so on.
“We’ve already had companies putting their hands up and saying" ‘We’ll do this for you.’ Some of them are 100% pro bono and with the others we will follow the normal procurement processes. We are taking up these donations and sponsorships because we can only do so much as the government.
“This is how we roped in some of the outsourced technical experts and engineers. This is the spirit of ubuntu. We can only move together.”
Brink confirmed the death toll still sat at one person and that the victim had not been identified.
The city's head of EMS, Andries Mucavele, said his team was prepared for extreme eventualities.
“Over the years we underwent extensive capacity training under UN Insarag [International Search and Rescue Advisory Group] guidance. Our technicians have responded to several international disasters such as the earthquakes in Algeria, Haiti, Japan and the Philippines and the floods in Mozambique and Malawi,” he said.
Mucavele said he had 180 technicians trained in various specialised ways to deal with crisis situations.
“All of them are trained to work in structural collapses as well as trench collapses and confined spaces, 80 of them are trained in swift water rescue and 120 to handle hazardous materials."
The key is co-operation.
“We form part of the Gauteng Provincial Government city region and through the provincial municipalities within the province help each other from time to time.”
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.