A house in ashes, a fire tender still broken — Dormaa Ahenkro counts the cost of neglect
It took only minutes for a four-bedroom apartment in Dormaa Ahenkro to be consumed by fire on Wednesday morning. It has taken nearly three months, and counting, for the municipality’s fire tender to remain out of service. For the residents left picking through the ruins, the connection between those two facts is impossible to ignore.
The blaze erupted at approximately 6:00 a.m. on March 4, tearing through the structure with a ferocity that left occupants scrambling. Eyewitnesses described chaotic scenes as tenants rushed to safety, some desperately trying to salvage belongings, others forming impromptu bucket lines in a bid to hold back the flames. Neither effort was enough.
“We did everything we could, but the fire was too intense,” one tenant said. “If the fire tender had been working, maybe the damage wouldn’t have been this severe.”
It is a sentiment echoed widely across the community, where frustration over the prolonged breakdown of the municipal fire engine has been simmering for months. With no functional tender available to respond, residents were left entirely to their own devices as the fire raged, a situation many describe as not just unfortunate but entirely preventable.
DOIII Eunice Adwoa Serwaa, Dormaa Central Municipal Fire Commander of the Ghana National Fire Service, shed light on what her team’s preliminary findings suggest may have triggered the disaster. The fire, she indicated, appears to have originated from an air conditioning unit connected using substandard electrical cables.
“Our initial findings indicate that the fire started from an air conditioner connected with inferior wiring,” she explained. “We urge residents to ensure that electrical installations are carried out by qualified professionals using approved materials.”
Her caution extended beyond the immediate investigation. With the municipal fire tender still non-operational, she urged residents across Dormaa Ahenkro and surrounding communities to exercise heightened vigilance around electrical appliances and open flames, an advisory that, while well-intentioned, has done little to ease community frustration about a gap in emergency response that should never have been allowed to persist this long.
The calls for urgent intervention are growing louder.
“This situation is worrying,” one community member said. “We are appealing to the authorities to repair the existing fire tender or provide a new one to protect lives and property.”
Mercifully, no injuries were reported. But the absence of physical harm does nothing to diminish the scale of what was lost. In the space of a few minutes on a Wednesday morning, years of effort and a lifetime of possessions were reduced to ash, and the families affected are now left to rebuild from nothing.
As investigations continue, the people of Dormaa Ahenkro find themselves asking a question that should not need to be asked: how many more fires must burn before a working fire tender is back in service?
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