Olawale Ajimotokan in Abuja
Two persons were pronounced dead yesterday after a perimeter fence of a building collapsed on the site workers at Ademola Adetokunbo Crescent in Wuse 2, Abuja.
The Director-General Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Abbas Idriss, confirmed the incident.
While giving accounts of what transpired, Idriss said the emergency agency received a distress call at about 10 a.m. that there was a building collapse in the affected part of the FCT.
He said when its rescue team got to the scene, they discovered that it was a perimeter wall that was inadvertently breached that fell on the artisans working on a building still at foundational level.
He said six persons were evacuated from the debris with two persons confirmed dead on the spot.
The four persons, who sustained varying degrees of injuries, were rushed to Asokoro General Hospital where they were receiving treatment.
According to him, “The uncompleted building was not the one that collapsed, rather it was the fence of a building close to it. What happened was that they (contractors) excavated deep into the foundation of the fence of the building housing the bank and caused the wall to fall on them.
“The best we could do was to sensitise the people to know what to do and also to call on stakeholders and those approving agencies, Development Control, Engineering Services, to ensure that they give the proper approval and ensure that they monitor construction going on in all allocations.
“The approval is supposed to be in phases, when you do approval in phase one, when they do according to specifications, you now give them approval for the second phase. By giving blanket approval to just go and start building, they can build with whatever materials they like. In this case, like I said, we are not talking about the usage of bad materials or inferior materials but because they extended their building into the neighbourhood wall.”
