PZ Building fire destroys several shops

• Posted on December 31, 2018
• by Ellsamwise King
• Comment

Fire gutted some parts of the Adum PZ Building in Kumasi at dawn today [Saturday].

The fire, which is reported to have begun at around 1:00am is reported to have destroyed property running into millions of cedis.

According to some residents, personnel of the fire Service on site worked tirelessly to prevent the fire from spreading to other areas.

Some eyewitnesses spoke to the media.

“We received the phone call at about 2 am this dawn that our shops were on fire, when we came every shop here and its content had been destroyed by the fire. I cannot even quantify how much money my damaged goods cost. There is a trader who lost all her five shops and another lost three and a third lost two.”

“One woman that came here had to be rushed to the hospital because she collapsed upon seeing the extent of damage to her shop,” a shop owner said.

“All these adjoining shops have been gutted by fire, none of us was able to save anything, my director has lost so many things that I cannot even quantify the cost. Many items were lost such as oil, nestle product Cadbury product and even PZ Cussons product because he is a PZ distributor,” a resident said.

The Ashanti Regional Fire Service struggled to quench the fire. According to Godwin Larho of the Subin Sub metro of NADMO,the cause of the fire outbreak is not known. He said about ten shops have been affected in addition to some warehouses and offices.

Fire during festive seasons

In Ghana, residential and industrial fires during the holiday seasons are more frequent than at any other time of the year.

The upsurge in fake electrical cables on the market, poor safety practices among others has always been blamed for most domestic fires.

Several lives have also been lost in such periods.

It becomes more worrying during the Christmas and New Year celebration due to the harmattan season, forcing regulators to educate the public to be careful when using potentially inflammable devices in their homes especially during the season.

On December 26th, the Ghana National Fire Service cautioned the general public on the use of LPG and other fire triggers during the harmattan season.

In 2017, nationwide surveillance conducted by the Ghana Standards Authority (GSA) revealed that more than 70 per cent of all imported electrical cable brands on the market were substandard and could cause fires.

Out of 22 electrical cable brands sampled for laboratory testing, only two, which were manufactured locally, passed the critical safety requirement test for conductor resistance at the GSA Cable Laboratory in Accra.

The test showed that 20 of the brands, all imported products, were not designed or test-approved to meet the requirements in safety standards.

The Director General of the GSA, Prof. Alex Dodoo, explained that the GSA as part of its consumer protection and import inspection mandate under the Standards Act, had begun the testing of imported products and market surveillance.