One person has been confirmed dead after a four-storey building under construction collapsed in Sewua in the Bosomtwe District of the Ashanti Region on Wednesday afternoon, July 17, 2024.
The victim, identified as Kwaku Gyemfi was one of the masons, contracted to work on the storey building.
The building suddenly collapsed on him while having lunch, an eyewitness at the scene revealed.
Prince Kwame Adutwum, the assemblyman for the Sewua Electoral Area, noted that emergency services who rushed to the scene spent hours recovering the body of the victim from the rubble.
After he was found, he was rushed to the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital but was pronounced dead upon arrival.
According to the assemblyman, a joint investigation has commenced to ascertain what led to the collapse of the four-storey building.
“I rushed to the scene following a distress call and found a four-to-five-storey building under construction that had caved in. His apprentice returning from an errand first signalled him of the impending danger, but he got trapped under the rubble in an attempt to escape. Emergency services were called to the scene to aid in the rescue mission. Unfortunately, he was found dead moments later,” Mr Adutwum narrated.
“For now, the private developer responsible for the building has been identified, and he has been invited to assist the police with their inquiries,” the assemblyman revealed in an interview on Asaase radio.
Meanwhile, the Engineering Council of Ghana has attributed high-rise building collapses in the country to the involvement of non-professionals.
At the inauguration of the Engineering Council and Ghana Standards Authority joint committee, the Board Chairman of the Engineering Council of Ghana, Dr Kwame Boakye, said,” What we have observed is that people tend not to use competent professionals in designing, building, and supervising these structures.
About nine deaths and 66 injuries were recorded in 12 separate structural collapses in eight regions in the first half of 2023.
On May 1, 2023, an uncompleted three-storey building collapsed at SDA Junction at Adentan in Accra, where one person died and two construction workers suffered serious injuries.
A 5-year-old girl was crushed to death while her sibling was seriously injured by a collapsed building at Ada Magazine in the Eastern Region during a rainstorm on May 21, 2023.
In another incident, a collapsed building in Nyangua, a suburb of Navrongo in the Upper East Region, claimed the lives of two children after a heavy downpour on the night of June 19, 2023.
Two weeks ago, a father and son tragically lost their lives after a building in which they were sleeping collapsed on them in the Wa West District.