The fire at the Grenfell Tower, a South African building with illegal occupants, has caused many deaths in the past few years

Tshwaku said that the fire started on the ground floor, trapping some residents who were trying to escape. He said the building is one of more than 600 illegally occupied buildings in South Africa.

He said the building’s interior was an informal settlements where people were crammed into rooms and shacks were thrown up. There were obstacles that made it difficult for residents to escape the fire and hampered emergency crews trying to get to the scene.

The local government official said that people lit fires inside the building to keep warm in the winter. The cause of the fire is being looked into.

By midmorning, the fire had been extinguished and firefighters were combing the structure floor by floor, searching for bodies. At least 12 children were among the dead, according to the city’s emergency services.

The blaze ranks among the deadliest residential fires in recent years. The toll from the Grenfell Tower fire is 72 lives more than the previous toll.

The Johannesburg Building that was once a checkpoint for Black workers: A story about chaos in South Africa, reported by the NYT, in May

Journalists for The New York Times went to the building in May to research a story about chaos in the state of South Africa. There was a pile of trash in the back of the building, and the second floor windows were sagging as a result of the overcrowding.

The city owned the building which once was a government checkpoint for Black workers, according to the mayor. He said that in recent years the city leased the place to a nonprofit that provided emergency shelter for women, but after a while the organization ended its operations there.

After the fire was extinguished, smoke seeped out of windows of the blackened building as daylight broke. Strings of sheets and other material hung out of some of the broken windows. It was not clear if people had used those items to try and escape the fire or if they were trying to save their possessions.

The witness, who didn’t want to be named, said he was next to the building where people screamed for help and shouted “We are dying in here” when the fire broke.

Robert Mulaudzi of the emergency services management said that 43 people were injured in the fire.

Abandoned and broken-down buildings in the area are common and often taken over by people desperately seeking some form of accommodation. City authorities refer to them as “hijacked buildings.”

Mulaudzi’s death and trapped bodies come from a building engulfed in flames during the May 24th eruption of the Bolshoi fires

Mulaudzi said the death toll was likely to increase and more bodies were likely trapped inside the building. The building’s five floors were engulfed in flames by mid-morning, but firefighters only worked their way through the third and fourth floors.