Downpour displaces 44 Ho Polytechnic girls

Ho, Oct. 7, GNA - A 45 minute torrent of rain in Ho on Thursday inundated the women's dormitory of the Ho Polytechnic, displacing 44 students. The two-storey Female Central Hall had all the 10 ground floor rooms flooded.

Items such as books, mattresses, electrical gadgets and foodstuffs were destroyed.

The students with the assistance of some male students spent hours scooping water from the rooms and where they could not, holes were created in the building to allow the water to flow out. The National Disaster Management Organization (NADMO) also reported the collapse of the walls of the offices of the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) and Stevens Hotel both in Ho. Ms Evelyn Klu, President of the Hall, told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) that the waters had made the rooms messy and unusable. She suggested that the affected students should be made to join colleagues in other halls.

"We will have to relocate for at least this night as the waters had ruffled the dormitory, rendering it unusable," she said Ms Klu said anytime there was a heavy rain, the rooms got flooded and that complains had been made to authorities of the Institution. Mr Henry Ametepe, Volta Regional Coordinator of the National Disaster Management Organization (NADMO), who led a team to the school presented 44 mattresses to the affected students. He attributed the situation to the absence of a "storm drain" and called on authorities of the Polytechnic to resolve the abnormally in time.