At least 16 people, plus 3 children, have died from a leak of poisonous nitrate used by illegal miners to process gold in a casual deal in South Africa, police and local government said on Wednesday.
Emergency facilities first reported that as many as 24 other people may have died in Angelo’s deal in Boksburg, a city on the eastern outskirts of Johannesburg. But police and Chief Minister Panyaza Lesufi of Gauteng province later said the death toll had been shown at 16 after a body count.
Teams were still searching the domain for more victims. The victims’ bodies lay on the ground hours after the leak was reported as emergency facilities waited for forensic investigators and pathologists to arrive.
“We can’t move anyone. The bodies are still where they are on the ground,” emergency spokesman William Ntladi said.
An officer noticed him covering a child’s frame with a blanket. Another frame can only be noticed covered with a white fabric from which a shoe protruded. It is under a strip of yellow police tape that delimited the area.
Police said the three young men killed were elderly men aged 1, 6 and 15. Two other people were taken to the hospital for treatment, police said.
Boksburg is the city where another 41 people died after a truck carrying liquefied petroleum fuel got stuck under a bridge and exploded on Christmas Eve.
Ntladi said Wednesday’s deaths were due to nitrate leaking from a fuel cylinder stored in a hut. He said the cartridge was emptied and teams needed to start tracking a domain a hundred meters (or about a hundred meters) from the cylinder to check for any more casualties.
Ntladi said government data indicated that the cylinder that caused the leak was used by illegal miners to separate gold from earth and rock.
Lesufi, Gauteng’s prime minister, tweeted videos from the dusty interior of a hut where at least four fuel cylinders can be seen on steel shelves. in front of the cabin.
Authorities said whether illegal miners they believed were to blame for the fuel leak were among the victims.
Illegal mining is rampant in the gold-rich spaces around Johannesburg, where miners close and abandon mines to search for remaining deposits.
Fatal incidents underground are also common. Recently, South Africa’s government mining company announced that at least 31 illegal miners have died in a fuel explosion at a disused mine in the central South African town of Welkom.
The explosion occurred through methane gas, the miner said.