Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on October 30, 2014

The Lagos State Commissioner for Physical Planning and Urban Development, Oluwatoyin Ayinde, has said that the collapsed six-storey building of the Synagogue Church of All Nations had no government approval.

Ayinde stated this on Thursday while giving testimony before the coroner probing the cause of the building collapse.

No fewer than 116 persons died while several others sustained varying degrees of injuries in the September 12, 2014 tragedy.

Ayinde, in his testimony, said investigations conducted by his ministry, following the accident, revealed that though the six-storey building had a record of survey, it however had no approval of the government.

He said the only thing found in the records was an approval for the churchs main auditorium, adding that though that auditorium has now been raised to eight floors, the approval given was only for five floors.

The commissioner who described all unapproved structures in the churchs premises as illegal, stated that there was need to investigate what he described as unusual practices going on within the church premises.

Ayinde wondered why, for instance, one of the columns supporting the additional three floors placed on the main auditorium had to take off from the top of a water tank.

He said, The approval that we saw was in the name of the Syangogue Church of All Nations dated January 26, 2004 but that approval was just for the main auditorium and one of the things we discovered was that it was an approval for a five-floor development. But on our visit to the site, we discovered that the building had been taken to eight floors; we do not have the records of the additional floors, making those floors illegal construction.

Did we see anything on the collapsed building? No. In our records the collapsed building has no approval.

He added, Id like to say that with the additional structure we saw on site, we are inclined to express some fears. We have seen, for example, that one of the columns is not taking off from the ground floor, but it is resting on an existing water tank and I dont know whether any engineer certified that construction. This needs to be investigated because it is an unusual practice to start a column middle way.

Read the original here:

Synagogue building has no approval, says commissioner

Category: Synagogue
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