Property worth thousands of cedis have been totally burnt to ashes as a result of a fire outbreak at the Sekondi central prisons quarters in the Western Region on Thursday night.
Although the Ghana National Fire Service (GNFS) is still not sure of the cause of the fire outbreak which has rendered three officers’ families homeless, it is believed to have been triggered by an electrical fault at the 10-room colonial block.
The inferno broke out around 9:00pm on Wednesday at the Block C of the Sekondi Central Prisons quarters when most of the prison officers and their families were either asleep or getting ready to sleep.
Luckily, no life was lost as they managed to evacuate to safety, but left their assets at the mercy of the fire, until the Fire Service came within minutes to put out the fire.
The Western Regional Fire Command’s Public Relations Officer (PRO), DO3 Emmanuel Bonny, who narrated the incident, said his outfit managed to bring the fire under control and will unravel the circumstances that led to the outbreak.
“By 9:41pm, the fire tender got to this place and they saw that two rooms were burning and it was getting to the third room. So quickly, our men began to fight the fire. But because of the huge nature of the fire and the way it was spreading, we called in a second pump. So around two minutes past ten, they extinguished the fire. After that, we began preliminary investigations and we realized the fire started from a prison officer’s room so we cordoned off the place so that our investigators ascertain the actual cause of the fire.”
However, victims of three out of the 10-room block who are occupying single rooms with a porch were heavily affected.
“I was changing my uniform after work when my neighbor called me to get out because there was fire. So when I came out I saw that indeed there was fire so we tried to use a fire extinguisher but it did not work,so we called the fire service.”
“I have lost my radio, computer, television, fridge and so many things including an amount of Ghc 3,800”, another victim claimed.
Commander of the Western Regional Prisons Service, Ernest Asante Adofo, and the acting PRO, DSP Isaac Bisilki, who commiserated with the affected officers called for serious housing support.
“All their properties are gone. We will invite the affected officers to find their immediate needs and find solutions to them. We have serious accommodation challenges so we have even asked officers to go out and rent rooms so that the service takes care of that. The officers are adversely affected and we hope our headquarters does something about it.”
By: Akwasi Agyei Annim
