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| Uganda: Dorm fire at school for the blind kills 11 girls. |
A fire at a boarding school for blind students in a remote
village close to Kampala in Uganda claimed the lives of 11 pupils on Tuesday,
according to the administrator of the school and the police who responded to
the scene.
“One of our dormitories caught fire and burnt at around
midnight. The matron made an alarm,” Francis Kinubi, the school’s founder,
said. “This was one of the dormitories for the young girls and it caught and
burned down and, very unfortunately, 11 girls, small girls, perished.”
According to a statement released by the police, there were
also six additional persons hospitalised who were in severe condition. They
said that it was still unknown what caused the fire that broke out overnight at
Salama School for the Blind in the area of Mukono, which completely destroyed a
girls' dormitory.
A senior official in Mukono named Fatuma Ndisaba informed a local
television that the victims, some of whom were girls between the ages of 7 and
10, had suffered severe burns that prevented them from being identified. The victims’ bodies will be identified
through DNA analysis, she said.
“You cannot tell who is who,” she said, speaking of the
charred bodies.
There was a gathering of a few people, including several
frightened ladies outside the entrance to the school.
The area was surrounded by a police cordon, and military
authorities were spotted conducting an investigation. On Friday, Princess Anne
of the United Kingdom, who is set to arrive in the East African nation this
week, was supposed to pay a visit to the school.
In Uganda, where classrooms and dorms are often overcrowded
and there is typically no firefighting equipment in place, school fires have
been a source of worry for education authorities. This is because most schools
do not have enough firefighting equipment. In several instances, officials have
pointed to faulty electrical connections as the cause of fires that broke out.
Kinubi, the administrator of the Salama School for the Blind,
admitted that there was insufficient safety equipment.
“I have to admit that we do not have systems like fire
extinguishers because we have always been appealing to government to provide us
with some of these gadgets, but in vain,” he said.
In the year 2020, two dorms at a well-known boarding school in
Kampala were damaged or destroyed as a result of different occurrences. Nobody
was wounded in any way.
In 2008, a fire that broke out during the night at a boarding
school in Kampala claimed the lives of 19 primary school pupils.
Source:
ghananews.hrforum.uk
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