A carpenter working on the construction of a Lebanese restaurant at Cantoments in Accra met his untimely end when the building he and his colleagues were working on just flat out collapsed.

12 others were trapped under the rubble, but concerted efforts from Police and Fire Service personnel led to their rescue and subsequent transportation to the hospital, with nine of them having so far having been discharged.

The deceased, according to Graphic Online, has been identified as Alex, a married man with one child.

The incident occurred around 11:30pm Saturday night, and the police got information early enough to go there; but between them, the Fire Service, and The National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO), they could not muster the right equipment to begin rescue work right away.

So that’s how the victim stayed under the rubble till the next day, at which point his rescue was rendered moot, since he had already died.

The contractor of the restaurant turned himself over to police to aid investigations, as the exact cause of the collapse is ferreted out.

Such building collapses are becoming a little too common, as most of us should remember the Melcom debacle. There’s been a couple more since, and in all instances I don’t know what the investigations yielded, and what guilty parties were ever punished?

The truth us there’s just too much protocol in the awarding of contracts and the like, so only God knows who receives the contract in the end and their level of competence. And there are never any repercussions when something like this happens so the cycle just goes on.

As for the ‘rescue’ teams, who arrived there without the needed equipment, the least said about them the better. But the question is who responds to a scene of a disaster, as disaster management, yet without disaster management tools?