24, July 2023
Douala building collapse death toll could rise as 16 confirmed killed 0
At least 16 people have been killed and nearly three dozen injured after a four-storey building collapsed onto a smaller one in Cameroon’s largest city, according to authorities.
“The casualty figures may be higher”, said Samuel Dieudonne Ivaha Diboua, governor of Cameroon’s Littoral region, where the city Douala is located.
The commercial centre is 210 kilometres west of the capital, Yaounde.
The governor said that “rescue workers, assisted by Cameroon government troops, are still digging the wreckage to see if more bodies can be recovered.”
The military’s fire brigade has been ordered to join the country’s Red Cross and other rescue services in searching for survivors.
Residents living in the Ndogbon neighbourhood where the incident took place said they were in shock.
“We heard people screaming … and struggled to help some out of the wreckage, but could not do it with our spades and hoes,” Gaspard Ndoppo, who lives near the collapsed buildings, said.
The four-storey building caved in around midnight local time and the cause remains unclear, but locals said it looked to have deteriorated with exposed and worn out rods.
Building collapses happen often in Douala, sometimes due to natural disasters such as landslides and other times because of poor construction, locals say.
Douala’s city council is currently demolishing houses in high-risk zones susceptible to floods or landslides but the building that collapsed was not marked for demolition.
Source: AP/Reuters
24, July 2023
At least 15 killed, 19 missing after ferry sinks off Coast of Indonesian Island 0
At least 15 people were killed and 19 more were missing on Monday after a ferry sank off the coast of Indonesia’s Sulawesi island, search and rescue officials said.
The boat sank with 40 people onboard just after midnight local time (1700 GMT on Sunday), the local office of Indonesia’s search and rescue agency said in a statement.
Six people were rescued and taken to hospital for treatment, and the cause of the sinking was being investigated, it said.
“Provisionally, there are 19 people who are still being searched for,” Muhamad Arafah, head of the local search and rescue agency in Kendari city in Southeast Sulawesi, said in the statement.
One search team will dive around the accident site, while another will search the water’s surface using boats, he said.
The ferry was crossing from Lanto village on Buton island to Lagili village on Muna island in Southeast Sulawesi, the agency said.
It shared images of rescuers mobilising for the search effort, and several dead bodies covered by sarongs laid on tarpaulin at a local hospital.
It is common in Indonesia for the number of actual passengers on a boat to differ from the manifest.
Marine accidents occur frequently in the Southeast Asian archipelago nation of around 17,000 islands, where people rely on ferries and small boats to travel around despite poor safety standards.
In 2018, more than 150 people drowned when a ferry sank in one of the world’s deepest lakes on Sumatra island.
In May last year, a ferry carrying more than 800 people ran aground in shallow waters off East Nusa Tenggara province and remained stuck for two days before being dislodged.
No one was hurt in that accident.
Source: AFP