TWO men burnt to death when their house was engulfed by fire in Brixton, Joburg.
The men were sleeping when the fire started in one of the rooms on Saturday morning, 21 October, and the cause remains unknown.
Five other people were taken to hospital with serious burn wounds.
One resident, Bradley Swartz, said it was around 5am when his girlfriend woke him up.
“She asked me if it was raining outside. When I looked through the door, I saw thick smoke. When I tried to come out the flames were already by the door. I grabbed my girlfriend and ran out with her,” he said.
He said when he realised that the house was burning, he came back to wake up his friend and other people.
“When I came in, my friend was helping his girlfriend to get out through a window,” he said.
Bradley and his friend Ramon Knight said they helped a woman who was trapped inside her room with her two children.
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“The fire was bad, but we managed to help them get out through the window. They were all unharmed,” he said.
They said the two men who died were not even burnt.
“Firefighters told us that they died of smoke inhalation,” said Ramon.
Kholiwe Feni said she tried to use the hose pipe to douse the fire, but water did not come out.
“The pipe was disconnected and has no nozzle to connect. I used a bucket to get water from the tap and poured it on the mattress. I used the wet mattress to fight the fire, but it was too strong,” she said.
Kholiwe claimed that more people could have died because some were drunk.
“Some were not even aware what was happening when we pulled them up,” she said.
The City of Joburg EMS spokeswoman, Nana Radebe-Kgiba, told Daily Sun that they received a call just after 5am about a structural fire.
"On arrival, the crew found the wall alight and immediately started with the search and recovery of the occupants. Two people died and five patients were taken to different medical facilities for further medical care," she said.
Radebe-Kgiba said the EMS was still busy with preliminary investigations to determine what caused the fire.
