‘99% of documents saved’ in Lands Commission fire

By:brightwebtv.com/nana asare barimah

Lands Commission has allayed fears vital land documents have been lost in the fire that ravaged its tired Western regional office, a building constructed in 1926.
Acting Western regional director of the Commission, Seth Boakye Owusu, told JoyNews Monday, their documents have been automatically backed up on the commission’s servers.

“I am 99% sure they can get every official document in there”, he told JoyNews Monday following Sunday’s incident.
More than two dozens of employees returned Monday morning to a scene of ashes and soot at the place that once housed their office equipment, seats and tables.

The one storey-building housed the office of the Administrator of Stool Lands and below, the Land Valuation office. The cause of the fire is yet to be determined and the regional director has pointed to several factors.
There has been no major renovation of the 99-year old building for a “very long time”.  “The wiring since the colonial days is still the same as today,” Seth Owusu described the building’s out-dated systems.
But the building has up-to-date air-conditioning, computers and relevant technological equipment, putting pressure in the power cables.

Some rewiring was started in the Valuation office below. It has not been completed. “During the process [of re-wiring], the power was very unstable,” the regional director said.
Some staff have said, on occasions where the power cuts, they could smell burning material. It was during another of those power-cuts last Sunday that the building ignited, the regional director told JoyNews’ Western regional reporter Ina-Thalia Quansah.
If documents have been lost, it will be those that were yet to be backed up before the fire did its worst, he indicated.

The Lands Commission regional director explained his outfit could do little in improving the infrastructure because his office depends on the head office for an initiative such as re-wiring.
“Everything is centralised.”

Source:myjoyonline