Following the fire outbreak which razed over 14 buildings in Dosunmu Market on Lagos Island, Lagos State Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu has declared that many buildings with structural defects around the site of the inferno and those that do not comply with the state government’s building regulations would be demolished.
Sanwo-Olu issued the warning yesterday in Lagos during the inspection and meeting with stakeholders, victims of the Dosunmu Market inferno which occured in the highbrow Lagos Island on Monday.
The governor, who said the state government would not shy away from its responsibility in ensuring that building standards are followed, added that, “I am going to shut down this place as long as it takes, there will be zero-tolerance all around here.
“It’s not by force that you have to trade. If you don’t have a conducive environment, go and look for something else to do,” he said.
The governor who condemned the avoidable fire disaster said, “We just finished on-the-spot assessment of the very unfortunate and preventable fire disaster here at Dosunmu Market.
“As you are all aware, this fire started on Monday and immediately, the first responders were activated and we thought it was something that we could bring under control in the first couple of hours.
“But unfortunately, as you can see, our people have been very extremely reckless and access was denied to first responders for a couple of hours. Even 48 hours after, the site is still a live site, we still have an isolated burning site and it is still an active disaster site.”
Sanwo-Olu continued, “This is a complete disaster. It is extremely unfortunate. As at the last count, we had about 14 houses in one form or the other that have been affected and a bit more might still go down after the extensive fit-for-purpose test that will be conducted over the couple of days here.”
“What I have seen here is what could have been prevented. We don’t have a full report yet, so I don’t want to speculate. But the initial report that came to us was just gross carelessness and people don’t understand what it means when we say keep your environment safe.
“We will conduct a proper extensive audit into what led to this. But as you see from the initial assessment, we have had an activation of an advocacy that indeed from the month of December and all throughout the month of May, these are high combustible weather that we have known will come year-on-year.
“We have been advertising on the media that people should know that during the harsh harmattan, the weather is not only hard, that you need to also stay away from combustible materials that can activate easy spread of fire and that is a kind of thing that we have seen here today,” Sanwo-Olu further warned.
He lamented that a lot of residential apartments had been converted into warehouses, as inflammable materials were kept in people’s sitting rooms.