THE incident of collapsed three-storey building, which occurred on Butcher Street in Dilimi area of Jos North Local Government on Monday. No fewer than 14 people were reckoned to have died in the incident.
The casualties include six members of a family who were buried in the rubble. They included the head of the family, Alhaji Kabiru Nalele, his two daughters Amina Kabiru and Safiya Kabiru, two of his grandchildren Fatima Rufai and Rahama Rufai as well as his daughter-in-law Mariam Rufai.
The casualties also included the attendants of a pharmaceutical shop located in the building and some customers who were there to buy drugs when the incident occurred.
The incidence of collapsed building is a rare occurrence in Plateau State. At least, no such incident had occurred for two decades before the one of Monday. Little wonder every resident of the city was left in shock and bewilderment.
Elrufai, the eldest of the over 20 children of the late Alhaji Nalele, told our correspondent that he was still in shock over the incident. “It is like a dream to me I’m still confused. I don’t know how or why,” he said.
Thirty-seven-year-old Elrufai disclosed that his late father had four wives and about 20 children. “Our father died at the age of 58 when the house collapsed three days ago,” he told our correspondent.
“The family never envisaged the accident. The house was built just about four years ago, so we never thought it could collapse so soon. All I can say is that it is an accident arranged by Almighty Allah. I said so because my father went to the house to inspect the portion of the house that had crack. He entered the house not quite five minutes when it fell and consumed him.”
A striking development was one of the family members who came out of the collapsed building unhurt. His name is Kamil Kabiru and he is 18 years old.
He said: “I was at the shop with my father and one of my elder sisters when the house collapsed. The house came down with force and trapped all of us.
“Initially, my father and my sister did not die. They were only seriously injured. I was not injured, so I could see that they were trapped.
“I was able to pick my phone and call people to help us by removing the blocks from our head so that they could take my father to the hospital.
“My father and sister would not have died if they were rescued immediately. But it took almost four hours before help came. By that time, my father and sister had died.” According to the eldest son, Elrufai, “my younger brother who was with my father and my younger sister in the shop when this thing happened was the one calling us to tell us that they were trapped on the ground floor.
“At first, he called to say they were all alive. But after two hours, he called to say they had died. You know the building collapsed at about 5 pm. But it was at about 9.30 pm that we could remove the debris from where they were and before then, the two died.
“The volume of the debris on them was so heavy that the manual efforts to evacuate them took a long time.”
God, must have spared the life of Kamilu to tell the story and give the particular location where the owner of the house and his children were trapped in the mountain of rubble the three-storey building became.
It took a combined team of the state emergency management agency (SEMA), the Nigerian Red Cross and the Nigerian Security and Civil Defense Corps (NSCDC) two days to search for the bodies trapped in the rubble. At the end of the search, 11 bodies were recovered lifeless, while four others were still breathing but in critical conditions. Three of those survivors rushed to the hospital died before the next day.
Elrufai, eldest son of the house, said: “Two of my younger ones died with my father in the building. Then my wife and my two little kids Fatima and Rahama also died. “Of my two sisters that died in the collapsed building, one was pregnant.
The entire building has three shops on the ground floor, the last two floors contained 2 two-bedroom flats each and another attached house. All of them collapsed. I’m still seeing all these things like a dream.
I wish the story is not true. How can I lose my father, my wife, my two sisters and my two kids in one incident? This is too heavy to be true.” The only disaster the residents of Jos were expecting was the flooding predicted by the metrological agency. But instead of flood, it was this that came without any prediction and consumed so much.
The incident has created room for guesses and permutations. Some believe the house was poorly constructed, others believe the entire building was a disaster waiting to happen but no one paid attention.
Some members of the neighborhood attributed the weakness of the three-storey building to the impact of the heavy machinery used during the construction of the street. The source said the impact of the heavy machinery used during the construction caused a kind of vibration that weakened the the family house.
Anyone that went to the site to see the collapsed building can only imagine the monumental loss associated with the disaster. Apart from the human lives which are inestimable, one can imagine the amount of resources that went into the construction of the three-storey building.
Is it the numbers of blocks used in constructing the building, the number of bags of cement used or the cost of other building materials? Most striking was the heap of drug that rested on the shelves at the pharmaceutical shop belonging to the owner of the house, and the cash accumulated from the sales of drug for the day, which was to be taken to bank the next day.
At the site, all that one sees is loss of the huge resources a man had struggled to put together as an investor. It was a case of life investment gone with the wind.
A group of builders who paid a visit to scene attributed the loss to the cost implication of embarking on cheap and poor construction and using substandard building materials.
The leader of the group said: “Two things must have been responsible for such huge loss of resources: it’s either the owner of the house did not make use of experts in the construction or the engineer compromised the normal standard by using cheap building materials to maximize his gain. We have always warned residents against this kind of loss.”
When our correspondent visited the family house on Mango Street near Masalachin Jumaat, Jos early Thursday morning, a third day prayer session was being conducted at the family house by the Jos Muslim community. After the prayer session, sympathisers from all parts of the state came for condolences.
Prominent among them was the Plateau State APC elders council comprising of Captain Din (rtd), former Chairman National Population Commission (NPC) Chief Samu’Illa Danko Makama, Architec Pam Dung Gyang and several others.
Din, the leader of the group, said: “We received the news of the incident that left us in shock. It is unimaginable, but we can’t question God.
It is only God that we look up to for solace. “So we came to console the family and to share the sad moment with them. And to also pray with them for the almighty God to protect the rest of the family and everyone on the Plateau from this kind of disaster
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