Fire guts largest supermarket in Tarkwa

Another fire outbreak hit the country on Thursday morning, this time in the gold-mining town of Tarkwa. A part of Ransbert Supermarket, which is the largest shopping center in the municipality, was razed down by fire in the early hours of Thursday.

But for the timely intervention of fire fighters, the supermarket, stocked with combustible items would have been entirely razed down.

Assistant Divisional Officer of the Ghana National Fire Service in the Tarkwa-Nsuem Municipality, Alex Esiam, says his men spent only five minutes to put out the fire, largely because they are few meters away from the supermarket.

“We were called at 6:16am, and it took my men 2 minutes to get here and then we spent just about 5 minutes in putting out the fire. It’s a provision store so items like Milo, chocolate, milk and others were destroyed”.

“We are yet to establish the cause of the fire but information gathered indicates that there was a power outage; and the power was restored around 6.00am. But for now we can’t conclude that the outage was the cause of the fire. But in two or three days, we will establish that”.

The fire officer however expressed concern about the practice where electrical gadgets are left unplugged from the sockets even when the gadgets are not in use.

"I have visited this particular supermarket and I got to know that even their warehouse doesn’t have smoke detectors. If they had a smoke detector, it would have alerted them. We will still continue to educate people on these things” he noted.

Ghana still continues to grapple with avoidable fires largely caused by negligence. It’s only the second month in 2015, and the country has already recorded some fire outbreaks in both private and public places.