Fire has gutted five shops on 411 Road Junction in Gowon Estate, Federal Housing Authority (FHA), Egbeda. The incident happened in the late hours of Monday.
It was gathered that a dry cleaning shop, a mini-cold room as well as a provision shop run by an octogenarian had every item in them destroyed by the fire. According to reports, the five aforementioned shops are part of eight shops attached to a Union Bank building in the area.
The fire was noticed at the make-shift shops at about 11.20 pm, the News Agency of Nigeria reports. Many of the shop owners had closed and gone home as some of them do not reside in the estate but those resident salvaged some of their goods with the assistance of the youth.
Reports has it that the youth had brought down the fire before the arrival of the men of the Lagos State Fire Service from Agege. Before their arrival, which took about an hour, it was all about wailing and lamentations by the residents and sympathisers who urged the state government to install water hydrants and fire notices all over the estate.
They also lamented that some of the areas marked for the development of infrastructure for sports, fire service stations and recreation had been sold to individuals by the FHA. "The areas meant for these purposes have been built up.
The last is the Kuwait Field which used to house sports facilities, including football, basketball, tennis and others had been appropriated by land grabbers,” a resident told NAN. "It has now become a shopping complex cum estate within an estate.
"It is regrettable that the Federal Government and the Lagos State Government are not doing much to ensure that the youth have their future their own way". The Fire Service Officer, who led the rescue team, Julius Adewuya, said: “We responded immediately we were called.
"The timing of the call was good because there was no traffic but we had hitches getting into the estate because of bad roads. The roads are near impassable but we managed to come for the rescue. "Equally on arrival, we discovered that there were not enough notices for the people to know which service point is nearest to them to call.”
NAN