Banket, (New Ziana) – Drugs and equipment worth thousands of dollars went up in smoke at Banket district hospital recently after a fire gutted a section of the health facility.

The fire, whose cause is yet to be established, reduced the hospital’s pharmacy department, rehabilitation and health information departments to ashes.

District medical officer for Zvimba, Terence Dandadzi said investigations into the cause of the fire were being carried out, but suspicions are that this was triggered by an electrical fault.

He said the value of the damage was also yet to ascertained, but this included Covid-19 supplies such as personal protective equipment (PPEs) and sanitizers which the hospital had just received.

We have been getting supplies for Covid from the past week – PPEs, sanitizers. Some of these had been taken for distribution but part of the supplies were left inside for safety and we are still working to find out the total amount of the things that we lost in the fire,” he said.

The public helped hospital staff to put out the fire after it took long for a fire tender to arrive from Harare. Neither Banket, nor nearby Chinhoyi has a functional fire tender.

This is something we need to work on and make sure that we have a fire tender so that if anything happens the fire fighters would be there on time and we need to push for every local authority to have a fire tender,” Mashonaland West Provincial Minister, Mary Mliswa Chikoka said.
New Ziana