Fire destroys 10 shops in Abuja community

Residents of Kado Kuchi, a community in Abuja, Monday woke up to an early morning inferno that razed down more than ten shops in a market within the community.

The inferno, which eye witnesses said started around 2:17am, affected a restaurant, barber’s shop, pharmacy, fruit store, among others.

When Blueprint visited the scene Monday morning, victims of the fire disaster were lamenting their loss, even as sympathizers were helping in salvaging valuables from the burnt shops.

Blueprint learnt that men of the Federal Fire Service responded very late to distress calls as they arrived when the inferno had done significant damage and were allegedly chased away by angry residents.

Recounting the incident to Blueprint, a victim of the fire disaster, Mrs Rita Ndidi, who deals in food stuff, said that she was sleeping in her home when she was alerted by her neighbours about the fire.

She said: “I deal on food stuffs and I just made purchases on Friday last week. All my products have been by the fire, including bags of rice, beans, cartons of spaghetti, gallons of palmoil and groundnut oil. I don’t even know where to start. I am just confused.”

In a chat with Blueprint an eye witness who identified himself simply as Moses, said though no life was lost to the inferno, the affected traders will take a long time to recover from their losses.

He said: “As you can see from the burnt items here, millions of naira have been lost to the fire. The guy selling shoes could not save a pin from the shop. The pharmacy beside the barber’s shop was also burnt down without the pharmacist saving a pin from the store.

“The fire is mysterious, though might have been caused by an electrical fault, as power supply has been steady here, though the transformer has been malfunctioning. If not that we had to switch off the transformer, the fire would have spread to residential buildings nearby.”

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