A 28-year-old man is receiving medical attention at the Manhyia Government Hospital in Kumasi after the articulated he was driving, crashed into a storey building at Aboabo in the Asokore Mampong Municipality of the Ashanti region.
Fuseini Faisal is said to have attempted to avoid a collision with the oncoming vehicle from the Kumasi Airport roundabout towards the Aboabo Post Office, when he eventually crashed into the building at about 11:30 PM Tuesday.
The incident occurred at least 100 metres away from the Aboabo post office, an equivalent distance towards the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) office.
“I had to jump out of the vehicle,” the driver’s mate, Fred Mensah, said.
The driver sustained serious injury and was rushed to the Manhyia Government hospital for medical treatment.
One of the stretches of the dual carriage road has been closed to allow for reconstruction works, forcing drivers to use the single lane at the far end of the DVLA office to and from the Airport roundabout.
According to Fred Mensah, there were two broken down vehicles on the single lane and so the driver, in an attempt to avoid colliding with an oncoming vehicle, veered off into the closed lane.
He said Mr Faisal failed to take full control of the vehicle leading to the accident.
“My master then crossed the median and slammed into the building,” he added.
The conductor claimed there were no road signs ahead of them indicating closure of the road so his master drove like any other day.
“We didn’t know the other lane was closed so we thought it was a normal day,” Fred said.
The vehicle remained wedged halfway through the building while structural engineers determine how to safely remove it.
The crash caused thousands of cedis worth of damage to the vehicle and the building.
There’s no word from the police but residents and passersby were in a state of shock.
Many of them gathered at the scene were wondering what could have happened if the incident had occurred day time.
“About 20 apprentices are trained in the shop where the vehicle crashed into. It would have been a day of grief if the disaster had happened day time,” an eye-witness said.
Residents attributed the cause of the accident to the reconstruction of one of the stretches of the Airport-Aboabo road and appealed to authorities to speed up work to avoid preventable deaths.
On October 14, 2019, a similar incident on the same stretch left a bus conductor dead.