‘I was in the toilet when the building came tumbling down’

Wilson Nduati, 21, a waiter in one of the city’s restaurants, had endured heavy traffic from the city centre to his home in Huruma.

It was a wet Friday night. He got into his single room house on the fifth floor of the building, locked the door, placed his phone on the table and went to the toilet. Then the building went down. He fell into a flooded sewer.

Nduati’s story is one among several harrowing tales of lucky escapes from the Huruma building collapse.

Several tenants cheated death and lived to tell the horrible memories on how they survived the tragedy.

The injuries on the left side of Nduati’s body are a reminder of the tragedy, but amid the pain, he is glad to be alive.

Seated on a bench at Mama Lucy Kibaki Hospital, Nduati leans back as he sips a bottle of water.

“I arrived at the building at 9pm. As I entered my house, I heard some tenants say the building had cracks and might collapse. I did not concern myself with their conversation as I proceeded to my fifth floor quarters,” he recounts.

Before long, the building had collapsed and he found himself on a waterway beside the building.

“The waterway that flows with sewage was flooding as a result of the heavy downpour. I had to swim towards the banks asking for help.

Good Samaritans came to my rescue and gave me clothes as I was naked,” Nduati told The Standard on Sunday.

His father Joseph Ng’ang’a left his home in Murang’a at 4am on Friday to check on the whereabouts of his first born son.

“I headed to Huruma but the area had been cordoned off by police. I came to his place of work to check if he had reported but he was not there,” said Ng’ang’a.

A relative saw him during a television interview at Mama Lucy Kibaki Hospital in the morning and called me. I rushed there and found him in stable condition. “I am happy he is alive,” he said.

Peter Kioko, 26, survived death by a whisker. Rescuers saw his hand holding phone, even though the rest of his body wastrapped in the rubble. Kioko (pictured) who lived on the second floor of the building, had just arrived home and was fumbling with the door when the building tumbled down.

“I was opening the door of my house when I heard people screaming. I stepped onto the balcony and the ground below me started to sink. I was trapped in the wreckage for three hours before I was rescued,” Kioko, who runs a printing business in the city centre, said.

Kioko, a father of two, suffered minor injuries on his chest. Fortunately, his wife and two children had travelled to their rural home in Machakos two weeks earlier.

“I thank God that I am alive and that my family was away,” he said.