The one-storey building that collapsed on Wednesday at Sunny Filled, Flour Mills, Estate, Magbon, Badagry, Lagos, killing four people and wounding five others was originally a bungalow until the owner opted to convert it to a storey structure.
One of the survivors described how he was eating when the building collapsed.
Arriving at the collapsed building site yesterday, it was revealed that the soil where the work was taking place was a swampy location.
The building’s rubbles also show that it was once a bungalow that had been converted to a storey building. And both old and new reinforcements were used. The majority of the iron rods utilized were 10mm rather than 16mm.
“We are here to pick samples from the building to enable us to carry out further investigation to confirm those primary causes, in terms of materials, to find out what was responsible for the collapse,” Okpe Rahmon, an official with the Lagos State Material Testing Laboratory Monitoring and Enforcement, told Vanguard at the scene. The test will determine whether it was caused by poor materials or other factors.”
However, neighbors confirmed that the collapsed building was formally an old bungalow before it was converted to a storey building.
Rahmon added: “It was on this bungalow that the extra floor was added, technically that is wrong because the foundation for the bungalow couldn’t have carried the extra load. So that is like sinking and compressing the existing building.
“So far, from our preliminary site investigation, we haven’t taken some of the samples to the laboratory, we can see that from the rubbles of the steel used, we haven’t seen 16mm, we have only seen 10 mm and 12mm.”
An official of Lagos State government, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said: “I received the news of the building collapse, at 2p.m., on Wednesday. I rushed to the site because I reside here, the police and other rescue operatives were already here. The people doing road construction at the expressway used their excavator to rescue those under the rubbles.
“They rescued nine because the 10th person was outside the building but he sustained minor injuries. Four of the construction workers died, who were plastering the decking of the building when it collapsed, they brought them out.
“We took those who were still alive and some who were unconscious to the hospital. The other four people died before the excavator could rescue them.”
Ada Peter
