Owners and traders of the over 200 shops of a major plank market at Alaro area of Sango that were reportedly burnt down on Friday, has continued to grief and bemoan their losses which they said run into several billions of naira.
Although the exact cause of the fire, which started around 3 pm is yet to be established, reports has it that the fire was as a result of the stockpile of planks and heaps of sawdust in the market.
As at 7.30 pm, men of the state fire service were seen trying to put out the fire, which was still raging,
Some of the traders estimate the loss to the fire incident to be over N250 million and expressed fear that if they failed to put out the fire, it could extend to other shops overnight.
One of the traders, who simply identified himself as Adegoke, expressed anger at the fire service and described their efforts as “lame and inadequate”.
“Since today (Friday) is Christmas, I decided to observe it at home like many of our members. But a customer called me on my mobile telephone while I was at home. I left my shop around 2.30pm after attending to the customer who urgently needed some goods.
“He said he urgently needed to buy some planks, so I went to the shop. After the transaction, I closed the shop and went back home. I was surprised when I received a call 30 minutes later that the market was on fire.”
“I am a medium-sized trader, but there are traders here with planks and equipment worth more than N5m in their shops,” he said. Apart from the planks, several sawing machines and other logging equipment were lost in the fire. I lost goods worth N3.5m,” Adegoke told the Punch newspapers .
Reacting to the incident, another trader, Afolabi, said instead of bringing more fire service trucks to the scene, only one was sent, which had to leave the scene three times to get more water.
He said, “Each time the vehicle left to refill water, we lost more shops because the fire would gain more ground. Don’t forget that this is the time of the year when there are more fire incidents. More fire service vehicles are needed to forestall possible overnight fire here. As you can see, we now pay to bring water tanker to help the fire service men.”
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