A perimeter fence at a building construction site located at Ademola Adetokunbo, Wuse II, Abuja, in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), on Wednesday, collapsed, killing two persons and leaving four others critically injured.
An eyewitness said that he was passing by the construction site at about 9.30am when he heard the sound of the collapsed fence, accompanied by a loud shout from the affected workers at the construction site.
According to him, he ran to the site to see what he and other people around could do to rescue those trapped in the rubble before it was too late.
“We were told that about six people were trapped under the rubbles, and we rescued four people and two were not looking too good when they were brought out,” he added.
Confirming the incident, the director general of FCT Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Dr. Idriss Abbass, revealed that all the victims were removed from the rumbles of the collapsed wall.
He disclosed that FEMA received a distress call between 10am to 11am on Wednesday, that there was a building collapse and drafted its rescue team to the site, on getting there, it was discovered that it was a wall that fell on the artisans working around the area.
“The six people were evacuated from the debris, out of which we recorded two fatalities, and four others who sustained different degrees of injury were rushed to the hospital.
“The uncompleted building was not the one that collapsed, it was the fence of a building close to it, what happened was that they ate into the foundation of the fence of the UBA building and the wall fell on them. The cause of the collapsed fence is that the contractors ate into the foundation of the UBA fence that fell on them.
“The best we could do is to sensitise the people to know what to do and also to call on stakeholders those approving agencies, Development Control, Engineering Services to ensure that they give the proper approval and ensure that they monitor constructions going on in all allocations.
“The approval is supposed to be in phases. When you do approval in phase 1, ensure that they do according to specifications, then approve the second phase. Given blanket approval for them to just go and start building, they can build with whatever materials they like. But, in this case, we are not talking about the materials used, it is because they extended their building to eat into the neighborhood wall,” the FEMA boss stated.
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