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City of Banjul
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
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Scrap metal dealer blamed for inferno that gutted 11 old GTSC buses

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By Olimatou Coker

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Sparks from a grinder used by a scrap metal dealer was responsible for a fire that incinerated 11 discarded buses at the Gambia Transport Service Corporation (GTSC) depot in Kanifing on Saturday afternoon.

The sparks reportedly set alight the dry shrubbery on which the buses were parked leading to the complete burning of eleven buses and partial damage of four. All the affected buses had already been auctioned as scrap.

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GTSC general manager Seedy Kanyi explained: “The affected buses were procured between 2013 and 2015. They are off our books. We have officially written them off after selling them as scrap to this scrap dealer. We agreed on a price, part of which was already paid and today [Saturday] they came to cut the metal or scrap bus into movable pieces to remove them from our site to their place and while doing that they used grinding machines and cutting discs.

“When you use a grinder on a metal, there is always a spark. The buses had old tyres and there were dry grasses around and when the area caught fire it engulfed the 11 buses that we scrapped. Unfortunately, all of them were burnt with very few spared.

“We had taken it up with them, that we expected them to take adequate precautions when cutting the scrapped buses, and they failed to heed the advice. They accepted that they should have done so but unfortunately, they did not. It is them that are going to lose their money; not the whole money, but part of it, because burnt steel will lose weight. Fortunately for us and for everybody else, no one was injured or killed in the incident, and none of our good buses were affected as well.” GM Kanyi said

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Kanyi thanked the fire services for their “timely intervention in controlling the fire”.

“Where it not for the timely response of the Fire & Rescue Services the fire could have escalated,” he noted.

The identity of the scrap metal dealer was not made public.

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