Traders at the Odawna Market in Accra are trying to salvage what is left of their wares after fire swept through their shops in the market.
Eyewitnesses say the fire which started Saturday dawn spread quickly through the market after an electrical pole caught fire.
Some of the affected traders who spoke to Citi News said they have lost huge sums of money which they took as loans from various financial institutions.
“I sell eggs and I was asleep this dawn when I got a call that my shop was on fire but I doubted the call because there is no electricity in the market so people normally use generators. I got here with my husband only to realize my eggs worth over GH¢6,000 has been burnt’,’ an affected trader Konadu told Citi News.
Citi News checks showed that because majority of the traders restock on weekends, some of them leave their monies in the shops so they can use it to buy their stuff.
Another trader , Esther who makes dresses in large quantities for wholesalers told Citi News, “We buy our fabrics from china and we have many employees workers for us and Our business is very lucrative, we woke up this morning only to realize this tragedy; I live at Mallam and had to rush here at dawn when my customer called and told me about the incident.”
According to her, each bail of fabric costs GH¢2,000 and she has lost about 400 of them, including plus “already-made” clothes.
As at the time Citi News arrived at the scene, there were about six fire tenders trying to douse the fire.
The police were also on standby to control the crowd and those who attempted to steal wares belonging to the traders.
In an interview with Citi News, the Deputy National Public Relations Officer of the Ghana National Fire Service, Prince Billy Anaglate said the cause of the fire is not immediately known.
“We had a call around 04:37 hours this morning so we quickly deployed our tenders here, we have also detected that some of the containers have fire in them so we are breaking in to quench the fire.”
Mr Anaglate described as ignorant, some comments by the traders that the fire tenders had no water in them.
“If we are working with 6 appliances and they are claiming that we have no water, what are we using to fight the fire,” he queried.
As at the time of filing this report, some of the traders had joined in with buckets of water to douse the fire.
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By Lorrencia Nkrumah/citifmonline.com/Ghana