Analysis of Causes and Characteristics of Market Fires in Lagos State, Nigeria.

Abstract

The weak documentation of disasters has resulted into poor monitoring as regards such disaster. Urban market has been affected by incidences of inferno. Lagos state market fire saga continued throughout 2007 and began also early in 2014. The lack of documentation as regards the characteristics of this fire has limited the understanding of the market inferno. This study is centred on providing a time series documentation of incidences of fire disaster in Lagos State markets. The objectives were to carry out a time-dimensional analysis of market fire incidences; examine the various causes of fire outbreaks; assess the impacts of fire incidences on traders and the immediate environment. A review of secondary data was done and descriptive method was used to analyse primary data. The study revealed that Lagos metropolitan area witnessed more of the outbreaks of fire in markets between 2007 and 2014 accounting for about 92% of the total occurrence within that period. During this period, shops were mostly affected and only cases where people resided within the market environment witnessed significant displacement of people. Most (57%) of the fire incidents occurred in the night which was responsible for late discovery and also extensive damage. It was gathered that most (95.2%) of the cases during this period involved losses in the tune of over hundreds of thousands of naira except a few (4.8%) which recorded losses less than ₦20,000. The study recommends that there is the need to increase government’s support of rapid response research to secure critical social science and geo-spatial data and information in disasters. This would help solve the problem of late discovery and enhance quick detection of fire events before the damage becomes extensive.