Officials of the Ghana National Fire Service (GNFS) in the Ashanti Region have attributed Sunday’s fire at the Kumasi Central Market to illegal electrical wiring in the affected shops.
Over 20 shops were destroyed after a section of the market caught fire last Sunday.
Cobblers and traders who sell leather materials at the market had their properties, worth thousands of cedis, burnt.
The Ashanti Regional Public Relations Officer (PRO) of the Fire Service, D.O 3 Desmond Ackah who spoke to Citi News said: “Our preliminary investigations point to the fact that that place is bedevilled with a lot of illegal wiring activities. Those wirings have been compromised, and they don’t have any protection. They lack earthing systems, breakers, fuses and all the systems that can take excess circuitry.”
“So at the time of the fire, there was a rainstorm with thunder and lightning activity. They suspect that these lighting flashes must have generated excess current into the illegal wiring connectivity there and caused this fair risk. This was also confirmed by the eyewitnesses,” he stated.
D.O 3 Desmond Ackah thus advised the traders to always engage the services of certified electricians when wiring their shops to avert such unfortunate incidents.
“We sound a word of caution to those people in the enclave who try to engage the services of these quack electricians who do not care about doing the electrical connections up to the [right] standard, through the needed safety protocols, to desist from it. ”
The fire, which started around 8:00 pm on Sunday, April 18, 2021, spread through shops after several hours.
Firefighters spent a lot of time trying to bring the situation under control.
Persons whose shops were located close to the section of the market which caught fire rushed to the scene to salvage what they could.
The last time a fire incident was recorded at the Kumasi Central Market was on July 30, 2020.
About 50 shops were affected in that incident.
