The Cause of The Synagogue Church Disaster Revealed

According to engineer Saheed Ariyori, who is a consultant to the Lagos State Material Testing Agency, the building collapse was as a result of faulty foundation.

P.M NEWS reports that Ariyori made the claim today, Wednesday, March 4, 2015, while testifying before the coroner’s inquest investigating the collapse of the building.

While speaking at the inquest, Ayiroyi, who was led by Mr Akingbolahan Adeniran, counsel to the Lagos State Government, stated that he was part of the team of structural and geo-technical engineers that carried out a Structural Integrity Test on the building after it collapsed.

Ariyori said: “Based on all the tests and the calculations, we discovered that from inception, the building failed because the base that was supposed to take the load was grossly inadequate.


“The minimum base that will be required should have been 4.5 metres by 4.5 metres but what we had there was 2.2 metres by 2.2 metres.

“It was a wrong choice of foundation base. The foundation should have been continuous base and not a pad as was used in the construction.”

Ariyori added that the load imposed on the foundation was far more than the foundation could bear, hence the collapse.

Responding to the claim, SCOAN’s counsel, Mr Olalekan Ojo, asked the court to adjourn his cross-examination of the witness to enable him consult with the church’s engineers.

Ojo noted there were some discrepancies in the building design which needed to be examined before the witness could be cross-examined.

He said the church’s consultant engineer, Mr Oladele Ogundeji, while testifying before the court had also disagreed with Ayiroyi’s claim that a raft foundation should have been erected for the structure.

This latest development is against a recent testimony of the contractor who built the collapsed Synagogue Church, Mr. Akingbola Fatiregun,who said that the affected building was constructed following best practices.

Fatiregun also added that though the foundation of the building was meant for a six-storey building, it was constructed in a way it could have conveniently supported four additional floors.

He also assured his company had carried out projects not only in Nigeria but in Ghana, Niger Republic and the United States for the last 11 years.

Fatiregun added: “On my visit to the site of the collapsed building, I observed that the pattern of the collapse was inconsistent with structural defect and suggested that the collapse could have been caused by other factors.”