Firemen lament over poor road as fire raze buildings in Osogbo

The Nigeria Fire Service in Osun State has decried the poor state of the roads leading to Alekuwodo in Osogbo, where fire razed two buildings and destroyed properties worth millions of naira on Thursday.

The affected buildings; a single-storey and a multi-storey, located beside each other, housed interior decoration and furniture materials, were completely razed.

According to residents of the area, smoke was observed from one of the buildings around 2:00 a.m.

Firemen lamented lack of access roads to attack the fire from multiple fronts and blamed the level of damage to delay in calling for their services.

According to PUNCH report, residents were seen lamenting the loses while firemen battled to put out the fire.

During an interview with newsmen, the Operational Commander of the Federal Fire Service in Osun, Isaac Adejobi, said his office was contacted around 2:30am after some residents battling to put out the fire had ran out of ideas.

He said, “We arrived at exactly 2:30am after receiving a distress call. The fire must have started earlier and no one called us until 2:30am. Our office is just about 2km away and we turned out immediately we got the call.

“People were fighting the fire on their own before calling fire service. It was when the fire was beyond their control that they called us.”

Also speaking to PUNCH correspondent, the Public Relations Officer of Osun Fire Service, Ibrahim Adekunle, said firemen could not access the affected buildings from behind due to poor layout, which hampered their efforts to extinguish the inferno.

Adekunle, who also noted that the cause of the inferno was not known yet, said the fire had been restricted and warned people living near the scene not to move close to the affected buildings because they were weak and could collapse.

Punch