The flattened 6-story Melcom at Achimota. Inset: The dead and the injured
For three continuous days, the Ghanaian media have kept their camera lenses glued to the scene of the tragic collapse of the multi-storey Achimota branch of the Melcom department shop. Cable networks and free-to-air channels beamed gory scenes of bodies being pulled out of the building which caved in on early morning shoppers on Wednesday, November 7, 2012.
Television channels, radio stations and other media outlets devoted virtually all of their airtime to the live coverage of unfolding events at the scene of the tragedy. Only a few incidents attract this level of media exposure. Aside media coverage during political elections, almost no other event attracts the kind of coverage given the Melcom tragedy.
Majority of those who suffered from the ill-fated shopping day disaster on Wednesday were members of staff of the Melcom Group- an Indian-owned super-shop that has scores of branches dotted all over the country. According to some of the survivors, they had a premonition of what was in store for them that day. “We were at devotion and we heard the sound from one of the pillars. So we were about to run and all of a sudden there was darkness; the building broke and fell on us. Some died, some were able to survive but thank God I survived,” says a tearful 20-year-old Selina Ghartey, a salesgirl at the ill-fated shop.
Reliable information indicates that when the six-storey building came down, it trapped retailers who buy bulk goods from the budget department store for onward reselling. Another segment of the victims also includes students who troop to Melcom every Wednesday to benefit from its reduction sales promotion. Apparently, Melcom cuts its prices by almost half every Wednesday.
Nana Akufo-Addo and wife Becky at the scene yesterday
According to the Ghana Armed Forces drafted to the scene for the arduous rescue mission of those trapped under the collapsed building, as at yesterday afternoon, 76 people had been pulled out of the rubbles that Ghanaians have instinctively tagged ‘Ground Zero’. Ten people have died; four females and six males. However, nine others were missing and were suspected to have died.
The 66 survivors are under various conditions from slight scratches to extreme physical malaise. “As at this morning (Friday August 9, 2012), there were sign of more people still trapped in the rubbles, but we are not sure of the numbers. Melcom however has indicated that there are nine persons on its list of staff still missing,” states an official release okayed by Col. Mbewine Atintande.
Indeed, Ghana has experienced myriads of disasters- from earth tremors to flooding, but most of them pale in comparison to the Melcom disaster. Perhaps, the only tragedy that matches up to the latest one is the May 9, 2001 stadium disaster that killed over 100 sports fans.
Negligence
Since the unfortunate incident, wild speculations and finger pointing have been the order of the day. Some people have blamed the incident on the negligence of the management of Melcom Group. Some of the survivors actually recount that a few days before the doomsday, they noticed worrying cracks on the central beams of the building. According to them, they drew the attention of the company’s management, but this was mostly ignored, much to the chagrin of relatives of the affected victims.
But Richmond Oduro-Kwateng, the Public Relations Officer of Melcom, counters by saying the company could not have known that the building was going to ultimately come down on innocent people.
Dr Abu Sakara with running mate Cheric Sarpong Kumankuma at the scene
Melcom is said to have recently rented the property from a certain Nana Akwasi Buadu who reportedly has other high-rise buildings in and outside the area.
Usually, these buildings are constructed under the cover of night to avoid attracting attention. Nana Buadu is said to have constructed similar properties in Kumasi and has attracted the attention of city authorities who have warned that the buildings were not standardized. Twig-like iron rods lined the pillars holding the main weight of the six-storey building. Also, it appears the concrete was actually starved of adequate cement.
Magnus Quarshie, the vice-president of the Ghana Institution of Engineering, was quoted in BBC’s Focus on Africa programme that the building was poorly constructed.
“However, looking at the debris, it shows workmanship was very, very poor. We can tell the concrete mix was not to the specifications we require,” he said. “When we further tested the concrete mix, the gradation was 14 and 15 percent instead of the normal 25,” he states.
Ghana’s urban centres are noted for being very lax on building inspections regimes, hence a bulk of the high-rise buildings in its metropolises hardly meet standard building specifications, making them death-traps.
Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) Mayor Alfred Oko Vanderpuije reveals worrying statistics about this phenomenon. Out of the estimated 117,175 buildings across the Accra metropolis, about 987 are unauthorized. Critics say the official figures are extremely modest, compared to the real situation on the ground.
TO THE RESCUE!The Deputy Israel Ambassador, Eyal Lampert, the rescue team and their dog at the disaster site
City authorities are generally known to be ill-equipped to monitor the booming property industry in Ghana.
President John Dramani Mahama, who visited the scene twice, was clearly upset about the state of building inspections. He ordered for all high-rise buildings to be examined by building inspectors, and defaulting developers brought to book. He vowed that city authorities are going “to be held accountable” for the disaster and other laxities in the inspection regime by city authorities.
Experts contend that that unnecessary red tape at the Town and Country Planning Department and other relevant city authorities is actually the main reason why developers circumvent building permits.
“I know estate developers would be ready to seek appropriate approval, but the bureaucratic processes, which could take months, force them to cut corners,” notes Kwabena Agyapong, former press secretary to former President John Agyekum Kufour.
Disaster Preparedness
The Melcom disaster exposed Ghana’s lack of preparedness for major disaster of the magnitude of the Melcom tragedy. For almost 24 hours when the disaster struck, the rescue team that stormed the Melcom disaster scene was almost left clueless about how to locate and extract the trapped victims in the rubbles. Heavy earth-moving equipment were moved to the scene and the heavy slabs that formed the floors of the collapsed building were moved.
The problem with this approach is that a lot of living victims could be crushed by the humongous movements. It took the help of a crack team of Israeli rescue experts to ship in their sniffer dogs and sonar technologies to bring sanity to the rescue mission. The sonar was used to map the hidden structures of the collapsed building: The sniffer dog, ‘Maxi’, was sent to identify survivors.
After this, the rescue team can work its way gingerly into the crevasses of the downed building to extract both the dead and survivors.
The deputy Israeli Ambassador to Ghana, Eyal Lampert, told DAILY GUIDE that the Israeli rescue input was mostly on gratis to Ghana, given its spectacular relationship with Ghana. Col. Mbewine disagrees with the notion that Ghana lacks the capacity to tackle such a disaster. According to him, the 48 Field Engineer Division of the Ghana Army was capable of handling all sorts of disasters. The only difference is the superior technology the Israeli rescue team brought to the scene, which Col. Mbewine describes as the “value of technology”.
Oscar Provencal, the Public Relations Officer of waste management company, Zoomlion Ghana, disagrees. According to him, “We really need to improve our capacity to handle situations like this.”
Mr. Provencal noted that the coordination of rescue efforts by the Ghanaian authorities was mostly disjointed; the command structure appeared to be coming from all directions.
Rojo Mettle-Nuunoo, deputy Minister of Health, appointed himself as the de-facto field marshal, whipping the military, the international rescue team, the police, the heavy machine operators, etc., into place. Even though he was undertaking his task diligently, it is unclear if he has the capacity to coordinate all these intricate agencies.
The National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO) has received wide public bashing for its lack of capability to handle serious disaster in Ghana. NADMO is often denigrated as the “blanket-wielding disaster management agency”, because of its propensity to distribute blankets to victims, no matter what the nature of disaster is.
The very structure of NADMOS may also be a disadvantage to the agency; usually, the administrative head of NADMO is a political appointment. The head is not appointed because of his/her expertise in disaster management.
By Raphael Ofori-Adeniran