On Tuesday, a fire tore through Dosumu Market in the Lagos Island area of Lagos State, engulfing at least 14 buildings, leaving four of them collapsed.
National Emergency Management Authority, Lagos Coordinator, Ibrahim Farinloye said the agency believes the cause of the fire to be careless refuelling of a generator in the penthouse of one of the buildings.
“The fire started from the Penthouse of one of the buildings where a man was carelessly refuelling a generator before it ignited the fire and escalated to other buildings. There were many generators in the building that further compounded the escalation.”
The fire began around 10 am in a three-story building on Jankara Street, then swiftly spread to other buildings. It is expected that goods worth billions of Naira may have been destroyed.
However, the Director of the Lagos State Fire and Rescue Service, Margaret Adeseye, appears to concur with NEMA’s assessment of the cause of the inferno which she equally claimed were escalated by fuel storage and other chemical materials inside the building.
Video footage of the incident showed that firefighters did not immediately arrive at the scene, and even when they did, faced an uphill task accessing the buildings on fire.
Nonetheless, Adeseye claimed “The Lagos State Fire and Rescue Service successfully contained a significant fire incident, with 14 buildings affected, two of which collapsed entirely and two partially,” Adeseye stated.
The incident follows a disturbing pattern of recurring fire disasters in Lagos State especially in markets and business locations. Only on March 21 another fire incident engulfed four buildings in the Idumota area of Lagos Island and did much damage due to a lack of water for the firefighters.
According to Farinloye, emergency responders could not effectively quell that fire because they had water shortages at the time.
In January, over 6,000 traders lost their goods to a fire that gutted the popular Mandilas building on Broad Street, Lagos Island Local Government Area of the state.
450 shops, 30 offices, two hotels, and five restaurants were destroyed by the impact of the fire, which affected the 14-storey building.
The fire ignited on the first floor of the Mandilas building and quickly spread to the seventh floor,
On February 4, a fire gutted a plank market near the Awori bus stop in the Abule Egba area of the state. The inferno ravaged goods and properties including several vehicles all valued at millions of Naira.
Nigerian businesses continue paying high prices for government ineffectiveness in managing fire safety obligations including quick responses by fire fighting responders. Perhaps the absence of laws for compensation and in many cases a lack of insurance claims, continue to fuel government negligence in protecting properties from these recurring fire calamities in Lagos and parts of the country.
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