Collapse Two Plots Away

Priority order: get help moving, stop the scene getting worse, treat what you can reach, then protect the bank.

1. Call, and call early (0-2 minutes). Fire service, ambulance, police, NSCDC divisional office, NEMA. Give the landmark, the number of storeys, the estimated number trapped and the fuel spill. A call at minute two is worth more than a perfect description at minute twelve. One guard is assigned to the phone and nothing else.
2. Clear the access lane. The lane is 3.5 m wide; a fire truck cannot pass a parked car and a kiosk. Assign two guards to move vehicles and the kiosk - this is the single highest-value physical task available to you, because every rescue asset is 8 to 25 km away and will arrive to a blocked road otherwise.
3. Cordon before you rescue. Push the crowd back beyond a line that keeps them clear of the leaning structure and the fuel. Untrained men pulling at blocks cause secondary collapses onto themselves and onto the trapped; the most useful thing you can do for the trapped is to keep the pile from becoming more unstable.
4. Kill the ignition risk. The petrol is running toward the drain. No smoking, no vehicle engines started near the spill, generator shut down, and one extinguisher positioned near the fuel - not sprayed onto it, since water and powder do not stop vapour.
5. First aid at the perimeter, not in the rubble. Gloved, direct pressure on the forearm wound, using the box at the gate line. Do not enter the pile for casualties; no trained rescue capability and no spine control means you may create a second casualty.
6. Then the bank. Shutters down as the manager asked, but that is the lowest priority and costs you no one.

Separate the instruction into its two parts. The manager's underlying concern - the bank's cash and staff - is legitimate; the specific instruction, that six guards stand idle behind a shutter while people are dying 30 m away, is not.

• Acknowledge the concern, then negotiate a minimum. I would offer: keep the shutter down, keep one guard inside on the branch, keep the CCTV recording, and account for every staff member. That answers the manager's fear without grounding the whole team.
• Explain the liability, not just the morality. If a guard stands behind a shutter while a trapped person is visible on the bank's own CCTV, the branch's reputation and the company's contract both suffer. Guards who act as good Samaritans within their training are protected; guards who abandon a post without authority are a disciplinary matter - so the authority has to come from the manager, in writing or at least by phone log.
• Tell the 200 bystanders what you need, not what they cannot do. 'We need this lane clear, we need these two men to keep people back, we need someone to go to the junction and wave the fire truck in.' Giving people a task moves them out of the way more reliably than ordering them back.
• Ask for two or three volunteers who claim construction or medical experience and place them under the fire service when it arrives - not under your guards, who cannot supervise technical rescue.
• Never let volunteers work under an unsupported slab. If the structure is still settling, digging is a way of killing the people underneath and the people doing it.

In short: comply with the manager on the bank, depart from the instruction on the guards, and record both.

Handover is a briefing, not a surrender of responsibility.

• Meet them at the cordon, identify yourself as the private guard supervisor, and hand over: number of storeys, time of collapse, estimated number inside, where the fuel is, which lane is now clear, where the crowd is, what you have and have not done.
• Give them something useful: your CCTV is recording the road and part of the collapse from the moment it happened. That footage may establish when the building went down and who was where. Offer it; do not delete it, do not copy it to social media, and log who takes a copy.
• Keep your guards in a defined role - perimeter, traffic, access lane - under the incident commander's direction. Private guards do not self-deploy into a rescue sector.
• Ask explicitly what the commander wants held overnight, because a collapse scene becomes a recovery and investigation scene, and your cordon may be needed for days.

Documentation by end of shift:

• Times: collapse, first call to each agency, arrival of each agency, cordon established, lane cleared.
• Names and roles of guards, and the manager's instruction with your response recorded factually.
• Casualties you treated and with what.
• Witness names for anything you saw, and a note of what CCTV covers and where it is stored.

This record protects the guards, supports the investigation, and is exactly what a disaster-management debrief will ask for.