The top 16 floors of a 24-storey office block collapsed in central Lagos on Wednesday, blocking the main commercial street through one of Africa’s biggest cities and leaving at least one dead and 24 injured.
Broad Street in the downtown Lagos Island district was completely filled with rubble and police cordoned off the area around the Nigerian Industrial Development Bank building while firefighters searched for survivors.
”They have evacuated one dead person and 24 seriously injured to the hospital. We are still looking for 10 more people we believe may be trapped in the building,” Lagos state health commissioner Leke Pitan said at the scene.
Building manager Kunle Adebajo, a former president of the Nigerian Institute of Structural Engineers, said the building had been sealed off since a fire on the eighth floor in order to minimise casualties in the event of a collapse.
”It was purely an accident. It’s the work of a fire that happened from Sunday night to Monday morning,” he explained.
The building finally toppled after the city was swept by a powerful thunderstorm early on Wednesday, witnesses said.
The first eight storeys of the building, which remained standing, are a car park while the upper floors formed one of Lagos’s tallest office blocks.
The death toll from the collapse could have been much higher, but Lagos has been placed under a daylight curfew during a five-day national census and the city centre’s normally teeming streets are standing eerily silent.
In recent years, dozens of Lagosians have been killed as the poorly maintained structures in the centre of this city of 14-million people collapse, including at least seven in January.
Once the centre of Africa’s most populous and oil-rich nation, Lagos island has declined as the government has moved to the new federal capital, Abuja, and business decamped to more upmarket addresses on nearby islands. — Sapa-AFP