The female hostel in the Jos campus of
the Plateau State Polytechnic was on Monday completely burnt down by
fire.
The fire, which started around 8.30
a.m., raged on till 11.44, throwing the entire school into confusion
as students and staffers scurried to safety with some bold students
making frantic but fruitless efforts to quench the inferno.
No life was lost in the fire that
gutted everything in the hostel.
“Many students had left for lectures
when the fire started; no one was around to remove anything from the
burning hostel,” Yusuf Ade, a security man said.
The fire service personnel arrived the
scene around 11.20 when the hostel had been brought down.
Mr Dauda Gyemang, the Rector of the
institution, who described the incident as “shocking”, attributed
it to a gas explosion which occurred “at about 8.30 a.m.”
“We thank God that no life was lost
in the inferno, but nothing was rescued,” he said.
Gyemang said that the incident was “a
great loss” to the institution.
“We shall move the students to
another place because the building is completely burnt down. It is
very devastating,” he said.
The Rector wondered why the students
were keeping cooking gas in the hostel, saying that it was against
the school’s regulations.
“The problem here is that students do
not adhere to the institution’s regulations; they are not supposed
to be cooking in the hostels,” he fumed.
Gyemang said that the burnt building
would be rehabilitated “in no distant time”, and urged the
students to remain calm.
The hostel’s Representative, Miss
Christiana Azi, said students lost everything “including original
copies of their credentials, clothes, food stuffs and other
valuables”.
“The incident is shocking and
devastating. It will be very difficult to recover from it,” she
said.*NEW News
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