Seven children were rescued on Sunday after a fire gutted a three-story building occupied by an orphanage home on Wole Madariola Street in the Aguda area of Lagos State.
In a statement on Monday, the Lagos State Emergency Management Agency, LASEMA, revealed that the inferno was caused by a power surge that emanated from an air conditioning unit in the building.
The Permanent Secretary, Olufemi Damilola Oke-Osanyintolu, said the Agency received the distress call on the fire incident at about 2:43 p.m.
The statement read in part, “A one-story building housing an orphanage or motherless babies home was engulfed by fire, which reportedly started from an air conditioning unit in the house as a result of a power surge that was said to have quickly spread out.
“A total of seven boys with ages ranging between one and seven years were quickly evacuated from the Home and safely relocated to the compound opposite the Home.
“The management team of the Home informed LRT of plans to relocate the children temporarily to the house of the owner of the home to ensure their welfare was sustained.
“The fire, which had initially spread to the storage room of the home, has been extinguished with dampening down, concluded
Post-disaster assessment revealed that the whole of the first floor was salvaged, while the fire was contained in the store room. The rest of the ground floor was also salvaged.
The LASEMA boss further disclosed that the children were formally handed over to the Deputy Director, Mr. Balogun, and Mrs. Rasheedat Sadik, both of the Child Protection Unit of the Lagos State Ministry of Youth and Social Development, who then formally handed the seven children over to the RED CROSS.
He added that neither injuries nor casualties were recorded in the near-fatal incident. The operation, he said, was successfully concluded in record time.