Oyo State-owned radio/television station was reportedly gutted by fire,destroying studio equipment worth millions of naira.
The Nigerian Tribune reports that the incident which happened at the early hours of Thursday paralysed the broadcast activities while the staffers battled endlessly to put it off.
It was gathered that the fire incident started barely few minutes after electricity was restored in one of the broadcast studio.
Confirming the incident, the chairman of the Broadcasting Corporation of Oyo State, Prince Dotun Oyelade said the incident occured barely some minutes to the airing of a live Sports programme.
According to him, ‘Just about when we are about to start another live TV sports programme, we observed that IBDC after the usual days of inactive suddenly came on and it went off almost immediately.
“However, barely one minute later, it came back and there was a surge. It was a big surge and it affected the electrical system in one of our studio.
“Our engineers moved in immediately to see what could be done. But you know the ambience of a broadcast studio is peculiar to the extent that the partitioning is acoustic, that is thick foams sandwitching thick woods in order to forstall audio interference.
“The smoke could not escape. We moved into action immediately because we have residential Fire extinguishers which is up to twenty. We deployed them immediately but the smoke was choky, lethal and very dangerous.
“We could do very little to quench the fire, hence why we solicited the assistance of the Nigeria Airfirce Base Fire unit, Oyo state and Federal government fire services to mitigate the disaster.
“As I talk to you now, it is difficult to give a scientific assessment of the damage. Before we can engage in that it will have to be tomorrow’
