At least ten students killed in Nigeria school building collapse
● Rescuers search for survivors after ‘illegal’ school is destroyed
rescue efforts were under way in Nigeria after a three-storey school building collapsed while classes were in session, with scores of children thought to be inside.
Witnesses said nearly a dozen students had been pulled from the ruins in Lagos yesterday, but at least ten were believed to have died.
About 40 pupils were pulled out alive, an official said. The building is understood to have collapsed about 10am local time (9am GMT) yesterday.
Video from the scene showed a few dust-covered children carried from the rubble to cheers.
However, the crowd quieted as other children were pulled out and slung over rescuers’ shoulders, limp and dangling.
Onlookers crowded around in the densely populated neighbourhood in Nigeria’s commercial capital and a city of roughly 20 million people.
Witnesses said nearly two dozen children were pulled from the rubble.
It was not known how many students had been in a primary school located on the building’s top floor.
The school could have had as many as 100 children at the time of the collapse.
Akinwunmi Ambode, the governor of Lagos State, said during a visit to the scene of the collapse that multiple people had been killed in the incident, offering his condolences to the victim’s families.
Mr Ambode said the school had been set up illegally and that buildings in the area were undergoing integrity testing.
It is not immediately known what caused the structure to collapse, leaving piles of dusty concrete slabs and exposed metal.
The collapsed building was a residential block containing a number of apartments as well as the school.
Hundreds of people stood in narrow streets and on rooftops of rusted, corrugatfrantic
ed metal. A single yellow excavator scooped at the ruins, a nest of rebar and dust. Later the machine started nosing at large concrete slabs.
Emotional, a number of shirtless men jumped in to offer assistance, hacksaws and mallets in hand.
Some were barefoot. One held a water bottle in his teeth.
Sani Datti, a spokesman with Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency, said officials from the agency and other emergency services were at the site.
“For now we don’t have any word on casualties as we are still busy with rescue work,” he said.
Mohammed Muftau, a local resident who witnessed the collapse, said the building had been cracking for a long time, with complaints raised about the structure’s condition.
There were scenes of chaos at Lagos Island General Hospital as parents and family members scrambled after every ambulance that arrived at the facility.
Many of the victims brought in were children in school uniforms.
Building collapses are all too common in Nigeria where new construction often goes up without regulatory oversight.
More than 100 people died in 2016 when the roof of a church in Uyo in Nigeria’s south caved in.
The collapse comes as president Muhammadu Buhari – newly elected to a second term – tries to improve groaning, inefficient infrastructure in Africa’s most populous nation.
“Nigeria’s infrastructure is generally less than half the size than in the average sub-saharan Africa country and only a fraction of that in emerging market economies,” the International Monetary Fund has noted.
“The perceived quality of the infrastructure is low.”
There was no immediate comment from Mr Buhari’s office.
Instead, as the rescue work continued, the president’s personal assistant posted on Twitter a photo of a gleaming new terminal at the airport in the capital Abuja.