From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Taverny-Sea, and this is The Daily.

A devastating fire in Johannesburg last week is raising troubling questions about chaos and dysfunction in Africa's richest city.

Today, my colleague, Lindsay Schutel, on how the city that was once a symbol of the hope of post-aportied South Africa is now an emblem of just how bad the breakdown has become.

It's Friday, September 8th.

So, Lindsay, tell me about the fire you've been reporting on in Johannesburg, which, as it turns out, is the deadliest residential fire in South African history.

So last Thursday, at about one o'clock in the morning, smoke began to rise from the downtown building, and by the time I woke up.

Massive blows in the Johannesburg CBD this morning, it is a very quickly developing story that...

It was all over the news. The firefighters rushed to the five-story building. Now, they are still searching through the building for more victims.

And the death toll kept rising hour by hour. When I first turned on the TV, it was about 20 people. Then it was 40 people. Then it was 60 people.

And then by the end of the day, it was 77 people, and I rushed on to the side, and the bodies were laid out in the street.

We can literally see that the bodies have been covered with metal sheeting, with blankets.

People who had run out of the building were sitting there in shock on the sidewalk, and it was just a scene of such devastation.

This is the building itself. You can see that it's burned from the back. It's burned from the front.

And up here, you can see some of the residents who were desperately trying to get out, had left a mattress there, and were jumping from the top floors.

Even though the fire had been brutal under control, by the morning by the time the sun came up, there was still smoke coming from the building.

And there were just crowds and crowds of people. And what we realised is that these were people who lived inside this building.

So up to about 600 people, possibly even more, just standing there, the entire lives, just in ruin and in ambience quite frankly.

And as someone who's from Johannesburg, how did you understand what had happened? What did it look like to you?

It felt horribly inevitable. So we have had a series of disasters in Johannesburg, and we've kind of just quickly moved on from them.

For example, a few weeks ago, a street quite literally exploded in downtown Johannesburg, cars flew up into the air, and thank goodness there were very few fatalities.

And you would think that seeing a giant crack on a main road would shock people, but it didn't.

By day two, people had to turn to their homes, they carried on, they cordoned off the road, and that tells you something about what Johannesburg is as a city.

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