Dear Editor,
After carefully listening to the interview of the general manager of the Gambia Public Transport Services and carefully looking at the pictures plus videos of the scene allows me to conclude that the whole depot management, board and the depot general managers are part and parcel of the causes.
(1) What responsible depot management safety or security company that are worth their salt would in the first place allow its complex storing all kinds of hazardous and highly explosive substances to be in that degraded situation as seen in the video looking like garbage dump?
(2) Which responsible depot management will allow any outside subcontractors to operate in her premises working with dangerous equipment and highly flammable substances without completing the whole safety regulations protocols in harness?
(3) Who on earth in his correct state of mind would buy a single word from the GM’s press conference abrogating responsibilities to the subcontractors and the scrap metal dealers instead of holding the depot management to account and allow the premises in that deteriorating state as a time bomb waiting to detonate?
(4) Looking at the pictures and videos tells how irresponsible and I don’t care attitude our managers can be. The fire incident is in the first instance as a result of negligence from management not respecting basic renowned safety regulation standards they all learn and fully well known. Who authorised the cutting and scraping to take place in the yard? Is that alone not mind boggling? Why didn’t the scrap dealers transport the buses to his depot and do the cutting and dismantling there instead of doing it in a depot where hundreds of litres of diesel and other highly flammable substances are stored?
To authorise non-trained staff members to operate in such premises is an act of negligence and irresponsibility that someone have to be held accountable?
Lye Lemon
Banjul
