firetrap

While a resident in the building later confessed to setting the fire, the report found that city officials knew about the “distressing conditions” and had allowed the building to become a firetrap.

That unrest helped prompt the construction of another jail; it was eventually condemned in part because the shortage of emergency exits made it a firetrap.

Within a few decades, that facility had also become overcrowded, and in 1957 city officials ordered it condemned because the surplus of people and shortage of emergency exits made it a firetrap.

Johannesburg, with a severe shortage of affordable housing, has hundreds of illegally occupied derelict buildings that officials and housing advocates say have become firetraps.

Such jobs, without guaranteed health insurance, social security or pensions, range from the treacherous — construction work without hard hats or other protective gear, or assembly-line labor in illegal firetrap factories — to the merely miserable.