[ad_1]
General news for Saturday, October 24, 2020
Source: Starr FM
2020-10-24
The church building has been reduced to a pile of rubble
The four-day rescue operation on the collapse of the church building in Akyem Batabi in the Eastern Region has ended.
Thirty victims were recovered as of Friday, October 23, 2020, 3 when the operation ended. 22 of them had died, while eight survived.
The deceased are made up of 12 women, 9 men and a girl.
The Ghana Air Force provided the sniffer dogs in the early hours of Friday to check for possible bodies covered by the debris.
The team thoroughly searched for the latest victim – a woman reported missing but not found under the rubble, so Church leaders were asked to report to the National Disaster Management Organization, NADMO, every time they smell a stench from the disaster scene.
Following the closure of the rescue team, the Director General of the National Organization for Disaster Management (NADMO), Eric Nana Agyeman Prempeh, praised the rescue team consisting of 210 people from various security agencies, and operators of four excavators, 7 dump trucks and 2 payloaders for working non-stop.
It tasked the bodies in charge of regulating the construction of buildings to intensify their surveillance regimes so that they can proactively prevent a repeat of such an incident.
.
Background
The collapse of the unfinished three-story church building occurred on Tuesday around 2:30 p.m.
The prophet Akoa Isaac told police in his statement after his arrest that he was ill and lying in his residence on the same grounds as the Church when he heard the collapse of the church.
He said he was told that around 56 worshipers were in and around the building fasting and praying when the incident occurred.
When police proceeded to the scene, 35 of the worshipers were seen traumatized at the scene while a 60-year-old woman identified as Afia Tamakloe lay dead. The rest were trapped under the rubble.
A joint rescue team consisting of officials from the National Disaster Management Organization, NADMO, Ghana National Fire Service, Police, Ambulance Service, BNI, National Security, Military with the support of Eastern Regional Minister Eric Kwakye Darfuor, who is at the scene, recovered 13 victims a few hours after the incident, of which 6 women died, one (1) in critical condition, while 6 victims, namely Adu Godfred, 21, Erasmus Larner, 25, Elizabeth Toot, 18, Bridget Birorey, 59, Jonas Larner, 45, and Charity Addison, 38 have been treated and discharged from the Oda Government Hospital.
According to one of the survivors, “We were resting in the church building after fasting and praying, so while we were resting, we heard parts of the building collapse. We had more than 60 years in the building, so we started to flee, some people managed to escape but others were trapped ”.
Some residents say that construction of the Church building began in 1996, so its structural integrity continued to weaken.
Send your news to
and features for
. Chat with us through WhatsApp at +233 55 2699 625.
