“It has been called off, it has been found there was no one under the rubble,” said spokesman Percy Morokane.<\/p>\n
“That was information we got from the eye witnesses, but it was found to be false.”<\/p>\n
Two people were injured.<\/p>\n
“It was a massive explosion, within a kilometre radius there were windows that have been blown [out] and vehicles damaged. It shook the whole ground.” The explosion in the Telkom building happened after 8am on the corner of Hunter and Kenmere streets. It left a five-by-15m hole in the ground. A manhole cover was blown about 500m away.<\/p>\n
“It is believed that there were two people in the vicinity. One was a Telkom employee in a very critical condition, the other was a woman who is being treated for shock.” Morokane said emergency workers were leaving the scene and the investigation would be turned over to Telkom.<\/p>\n
“We are handing over the whole investigation to Telkom. They are calling their engineers to the scene.”<\/p>\n
The company said the explosion was caused by an underground gas leakage, and not by a municipal transformer, as was earlier believed.<\/p>\n
Telkom was relieved that both the injured were currently in a stable condition and receiving medical care at a Johannesburg hospital.<\/p>\n
“Service restoration to affected voice, data, DSL and MCO (mobile cellular operator) links is now the highest company priority,” the company said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Progress in this regard was being delayed because the building which houses Telkom’s Yeoville exchange had been declared unsafe by the Johannesburg fire department.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The search for more victims of a blast at a Telkom building in Yeoville on Wednesday morning has been called off, Johannesburg emergency services said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11281"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11281\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}