At least 15 people killed as blaze rips through Nairobi
A fire has swept through one of Nairobi’s largest open-air markets, killing 15 people, with 70 injured in hospital.
Traders who lived there struggled to wake their families and flee yesterday’s early morning blaze.
Nairobi County Commissioner Kangethe Thuku said six bodies had been recovered and nine were in a building and had yet to be retrieved.
Rescue teams searched for more bodies and survivors in Gikomba market in the Pumwani low-income neighbourhood in Kenya’s capital.
Some of the victims were burned while others inhaled poisonous fumes as they tried to salvage their property.
Hospital officials said there were four children among the dead.
The injured were rushed to different hospitals across the city.
Many Kenyans shop for secondhand clothes from the market, which also supplies other vendors with used clothes from Europe and the United States.
Mr Thuku said the cause of the fire was not immediately confirmed, but “for now we have declared this site a crime scene”.
Security forces guarded the smoking site as workers picked through the blackened rubble.
One market trader, Ruth Kaveke, grasped a wad of burnt currency.
She said it was the only thing she had managed to salvage from her cloth-making store.
It was the second time fire had destroyed her only source of livelihood in as many years.
“I live in the market because it is convenient and I wanted to be close by, just in case of fire I could salvage my property,” she said.
However, her two children would not easily wake up when the latest fire broke out.
By the time she got them to safety, it was too late to save anything else. The flames broke out at Kwa Mbao area, according to the Kenya Red Cross, before spreading to other parts of the informal market.
The blaze that consumed timber yards and bales of used clothes intensified within an hour and a half. By 7:30am, firefighters from Nairobi City County Fire Brigade were still battling to put it out.
Residents said the crowded market has had fires multiple times in recent years, with traders having suffered huge losses.
Officials have said access roads were clogged with traders who block emergency response services, while critics say those services were poor.
The market is a five-minute walk from Nairobi’s central business district in an area targeted by the Nairobi county government for an upgrade.