More
than 100 people who rushed to scoop up fuel after a Nigerian petrol
tanker tipped over Thursday were burned to death when the vehicle and
pools of spilled oil caught fire.
Children were among those
killed, while dozens more were badly burned, despite a warning from
troops who arrived at the crash site that a blaze could ignite at any
moment.
More than 85 of the victims have been buried at the scene as their bodies, burned beyond recognition, could not be moved.
The
tanker driving in the southern Rivers state swerved trying to avoid a
collision with three oncoming vehicles including a bus, said Kayode
Olagunju, head of the Federal Road Safety Commission in the state.
Shortly after the collision hundreds of locals in the Ahoada area flocked to the scene to collect the spilling fuel.
Some
troops who reached the site before the fire broke out told people to
clear off, but many ignored the warning, an official from the National
Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) said.
Military personnel “got
to the scene before us. They warned people to leave the scene to avoid
disaster. But many of them were busy scooping fuel. They disobeyed,”
Emenike Umesi of NEMA explained.
The state’s information
commissioner Ibim Semenitari told AFP that “more than 100 people were
killed in the inferno… while around 50 with severe burns have been
hospitalised.”
Large excavators were brought to the site on a
major inter-state highway to dig a mass grave for dozens of victims
whose bodies were too badly damaged to be transported or recognised.
“They couldn’t be moved,” Semenitari said, putting the number of those already buried at more than 85.
Some
of those being treated at the hospital were also burned beyond
recognition, said Geoffrey Ikogha, a local chief in Ahoada, near the oil
hub of Port Harcourt.
He confirmed that women and children were among those killed.
Given the severity of the burns suffered by some at the hospital, the toll could yet increase, Semenitari told AFP.
“There is a chance that we could lose 10 to 15 more… medically, they are in a bad state,” she said.
The number of family and friends at the General Hospital in Ahoada was huge, with many sobbing uncontrollably.
“Security people are having tough time controlling the surging crowd,” said Ikogha. “The situation is tragic and pathetic.”
Many
of the dead were motorcycle taxi operators, known locally as “Okada”,
who raced to fill up their tanks after learning of the crash, according
to an AFP photographer at the scene.
Motorcycle taxi driver
Kingsley Jafure said the collision occurred at roughly 6:00 am, and that
the spilled petrol caught fire about 90 minutes later, but officials
said the time between the crash and the blaze was shorter.
“At
about 7:30 while I was inside trying to decide whether to go (scoop
fuel) or not. That is when I saw that the tanker exploded,” Jafure said.
Nigeria’s
President Goodluck Jonathan lamented “the fact that once again, so many
Nigerian lives have been lost in an avoidable fuel fire disaster.”
Fuel leaks and oil tanker accidents in Nigeria often draw huge crowds and many deaths have been caused by accidental fires.
Major
road accidents, often involving poorly maintained large-haul trucks,
are also common in the country, where many of the roads are in terrible
condition.
Olagunju of the road safety agency declined to comment
on the state of the roads in the area, or the potential causes of the
crash, saying he did want to undermine the investigation.
Rivers
Governor Chibuike Amaechi demanded a full probe in a statement released
by his office, which called the event an “avoidable tragedy.”
In
October 1998, more than 1,000 people died at Jesse, in the southeastern
Delta state, when a pipeline exploded as people tried to steal fuel.
In
April last year, a fuel tanker overturned at an army checkpoint in the
central part of the country, sparking an inferno in which some 50 people
were killed.
More than 17,000 people died in about 31,000 road
accidents across Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, between 2007
and 2009, according to the road federal road safety agency’s 2010
report, the most recent published.
Reported by Ben Eguzozie/AFP
