Amidst skepticisms over the seeming slow pace of rescue operations at the site of the collapsed seven story building in Port Harcourt, the National Emergency Mangement Agency (NEMA) says it is due to the peculiar nature of the building collapse.
The South-South Coordinator of the Agency, Ejike Martins Udeinya, who revealed this in an interview with newsmen at the site, said the collapse was such that debris would have to be removed floor-by-floor, if lives must be saved.
This, he said, was the first of its kind in the history of NEMA’s involvements in rescue missions of building collapse.
“The building (seven storey) collapse in Rivers State is a peculier one, because in all over our (NEMA) experience in search and rescue operations, we have never seen a building collapse of such magnitude, and in this form”, Udeinya said.
According to the NEMA boss, the peculiarity of this particular building collapse is in the context of the floors collapsing directly on each other. The implication, he explained, was that the debris would have to be removed bit by bit and floor by floor.
“This has made the rescue relatively slow”, he stated, leading to the relatively long time it has taken to either rescue people trapped in the building, or retrieve their corpses.
He, therefore, used the opportunity to urge the media to enlighten the public on these intricacies involved in the ongoing rescue mission at the site.
It would be recalled that the seven storey building at Woji Road, GRA, in Port Harcourt, which was under construction, collapsed on the 19th of November, 2018.
As at the time of filing this report, a total of 31 persons had been rescued alive, and 12 corpses recovered.

By: Beauty David-West.