THE Commission of Inquiry into the cause of the five-storey Usindiso Building fire has been postponed indefinitely.
This comes as safety has been raised as a major concern.
It's believed that the venue of the proceedings in Parktown, Joburg, was too small and posed a safety concern.
The already delayed inquiry was supposed to resume with its third session on Monday, 30 October, with Wynand Engelbrecht from Fire Ops SA scheduled to testify as one of the first responders to the fatal fire, but this never happened.
According to the commission chair, Sisi Khampepe, proceedings were postponed after the City of Joburg's fire chiefs had served it with a notice of non-compliance.
“I regret to advise that today’s proceedings have been postponed because the commission has been served with a notice by the city’s emergency management services that the venue is not compliant with the by-laws of the city,” said Khampepe.
Following this postponement, Khampepe said they would be working on securing a new venue.
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“As soon as this has been secured, we will advise members of the public and the media accordingly. These proceedings are postponed to a date and venue to be announced in due course,” she said.
The commission, chaired by Khampepe, was instituted to investigate the circumstances surrounding the deadly fire that killed more than 70 people on 31 August and the prevalence of abandoned and hijacked buildings in the inner city.
The inquiry started on Thursday, 26 October, with horrifying details from the acting chief of the Emergency Service, Rapulane Monageng.
Monageng labelled the conditions inside the buildings as a maze, saying the homes were created with highly flammable materials such as wooden boards, plywood, chipboard and plastics.
He said the difficulty in distinguishing the fire was that every corner of the building had been converted into a living space using wooden structures and, in some instances, shacks.
Another witness who was due to take the stand on Friday, 27 October, was City of Joburg EMS divisional chief David Ntemi Thabe, who detailed how two people died after jumping out of the building to escape the blaze.
