No approved building plan for collapsed Ormonde building
Johannesburg City Manager Floyd Brink says an initial investigation found no evidence of approved plans for the structure that collapsed in Ormonde, south of Johannesburg on Monday afternoon.
"At this point we do have our engineers on site as well as our building control officials and we are now busy to look at the structural integrity of this particular building. We are trying our best for our teams to work around the clock but at some point if it becomes unsafe for them to do so, we will have to call it off and continue again in the morning,” he said on Monday evening.
The building, which was still under construction, gave way, killing six construction workers and trapping others beneath piles of rubble.
"As I have indicated that the number of those affected is 15 of which the first six we have managed to transport to the hospital. There is 6 fatalities, the remaining three, we can indicate to you that they are all unaccounted for", Brink said.
He added that swift action will be taken against those at fault, particularly any city officials involved.
"The contractor and the engineers are AWOL at this point; we cannot get a hold of them here, so our teams are now quickly ensuring that we start to trace that. There will definitely be consequences, and of course, there will be consequences in the City of Johannesburg in the relevant departments.
'We can also confirm that the remaining three is still unaccounted for and how we got to that number is that at the time our teams arrived at the scene somebody managed to indicate to them in terms of the number of people that were on the building site, what is critical to note is that as things stand now, looking at the preliminary investigations we cannot seem to find any form of the approved plans because in an areas like this you should have had an SDF as well as any other approved building plans."
The recovery mission is ongoing.
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