Yaounde: Fire Guts Popular Nightclub

A wild fire has gutted a popular Nightclub known as Safari nightclub in Yaoundé, Cameroon’s political capital city. The fire disaster occurred in the evening of Wednesday, April 25, 2018 at about 9pm.

The owner and employees of the Safari Nightclub located in the Hippodrome district of Yaoundé, looked so downcast following this inferno.

Steve Etienne Dongmo, the manager of the establishment, revealed that “an employee of the kitchen section left oil in a pan on the fire and went out. On his return, the flames had already begun to devour part of the room. In panic, he tried to extinguish them with a fire extinguisher, to no avail. According to other witnesses, the cook in question was carried away by the Champions League match between Real Madrid and Bayern Munich broadcast at the same time in another part of the building called “American bar”.

Upon spotting the smoke from the fire that entered the lobby of the nightclub, the other employees present on the scene, first evacuated the customers of the establishment, then, tried to extinguish the fire.

According to Steve Etienne Dongmo, “the fire department rushed to the scene and the fire was stopped at about 11:00 pm, in the presence of some authorities and elements of the National Security as well as the National Gendarmerie that were also on hand to get first hand information about the conflagration”.

For now, the damage has not been evaluated accurately because, according to Steve E. Dongmo, the evaluation will be made by an insurer that visited the disaster site in the morning of Thursday.

However, sources told our correspondent in Yaoundé that the fire affected only part of the premises of the establishment. “Only the restaurant was touched but the snack bar, the bar, the nightclub and even the sound system, are functional. We will open our doors tonight as usual,” the manager of the nightclub reassured.

He sounded very upbeat that Safari nightclub was going to be opened as from 10pm normally and that, events that were scheduled for last weekend were going to take place normally.

Meanwhile, when TCR visited the scene, the staff of the nighclub was engaged in the serious task of clearing off the debris from the fire accident.

No one was hurt.

By THR