The Director-General, Lagos State Emergency Management Agency (LASEMA), Dr Olufemi Oke-Osanyintolu, on Tuesday revealed that the agency recorded three major building collapse incidents in the last three months.
Oke-Osanyintolu made this known in an interview newsmen in Lagos.
According to him, there are minor and major collapsed buildings but we have only witnessed three major collapsed buildings in the last three months while few people that sustained injuries were treated and discharged.
“We are appealing to the citizens of Lagos State to key into the Vision and Mission of this administration.
“In as much that we are doing everything humanly possible to ensure that no building collapsed, our people too need to ensure that they get proper approval in building their structures.
“They should also ensure that they do not build their houses in such a way that will prevent the free-flow of water.
“They should ensure that they use good materials in building their structures and those people that had built their structures for a long time, need to maintain it,” Oke-Osanyintolu said.
According to him, we have a Solid Material Testing Agency to test their structures regularly.
He warned that LASEMA would sanction anybody that violates the rules and regulations of building houses in Lagos State.
Oke-Osanyintolu mentioned crowd-control as the major challenge the agency usually faced during rescue operations in cases of disasters, saying that right now, the agency had overcome the challenge as a result of continuous sensitisation.
He noted that the sensitisation of stakeholders through the local governments and residents of Lagos had built confidence in the agency, whereby people quickly reached out to the agency whenever there were disasters.
He said that LASEMA had security personnel being trained to control the crowd at the scene of emergency disasters, saying that the agency was looking forward to achieving maximum success in the area of crowd-control.
The director-general said that the agency also had a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with some consulting firms and had all the equipment to respond to any form of emergency in the state.
