Three children of the same parents have been burnt to death after a candle light caused an inferno in their family house.
The electricity situation in the country has claimed the lives of three innocent children of the same parents when an
inferno
ignited by a candle light engulfed their apartment in the Jakande
Estate, Mile 2 area of Lagos State on Tuesday night. The young victims
were identified as Darasimi Ilori (eight months old), Temiloluwa (7),
and Daniel (10).
Punch Metro
reports that Temilololuwa and Daniel were pupils of Sabis Nursery and
Primary School and were in primary three and five respectively.
It was gathered from residents that the
fire started after the mother of the children lit a candle, shortly after returning from a church service.
She
was said to have locked the children in the room and then went out to
pick clothes she had washed and spread out to dry earlier in the day.
Few minutes later, while the kids were asleep, the room was said to have
been engulfed in smoke, before fire gutted the flat and burnt the
children to death.
A resident, Ejiro Omamogho, told our Punch Newspaper that the fire started at 10pm.
When
I was locking up my shop around 10pm, I saw their mother coming back
from church. The children were feeling sleepy, so she went upstairs to
drop them and shut the room. She lit a candle to illuminate the house
before coming downstairs to pack their clothes she spread on the line.
Within
a few minutes, I heard a neighbour shouting, ‘Fire! Fire! Fire!’ There
was pandemonium everywhere. By the time we came out, I asked Iya Daniel
(Daniel’s mother) where her children were, and she told me they were
inside the house.
Another resident, Esther
Esiorho, reported that the father of the children, who had just returned
from Victoria Island where he worked as a chef in an eatery, began to
make rescue efforts.
Their father ran back
because the fire was too intense. What I, however, saw was that the
seven-year-old girl, Temiloluwa, had woken up and carried her
eight-month-old sister, wanting to run out with her.
But
as she got into the parlour, the ceiling collapsed on them and they
fell. Both of them were burnt to death. When we were removing their
bodies, we saw the skeleton of Temiloluwa and the baby, clutching to
each other.
It was learnt that immediately the
incident happened, the victims’ parents were overcome by grief. While
Mrs. Ilori reportedly began speaking incoherently, her husband passed
out and were rushed to the Amuwo Medical Centre and their conditions
were critical.
Meanwhile, reports have it that
while the fire raged, the state fire service did not come on time to
help with the rescue operations despite desperate calls for them.
One
of the youths who spearheaded the rescue operation, Gabriel Omamogho,
decried the attitude of the firefighters, whom he accused of arriving
late at the scene and without the right equipment.
The
fire service officials came around past 11pm. When they arrived, they
were not with a sledgehammer, ladder or even a fire extinguisher. The
youths in the estate climbed up and drew the hose upstairs. We put out
the fire at 12am and I took the corpse to the mortuary.
But the Director of the Lagos State Fire Service, Rasak Fadipe, said his men did not get the alert on time.
When
we got there, we met the fire well alight. The Isolo fire truck was the
first to respond with 10,000 litres of water and when I received a
signal that the fire was serious, I had to deploy another fire truck
from the Sari-Iganmu fire station, with additional 10,000 litres of
water.
However, some of the youths on
ground tried to take over the fire equipment from us and out of
overzealousness, damaged some of them.
They
delayed in calling us and that was why we were not able to rescue the
children. Two flats of three bedrooms each were destroyed by the fire,
while we prevented the fire from getting to the ground and first floors.
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