A petrol truck exploded on the outskirts of Sierra Leone's capital city at the end of Friday, killing at least 98 people and injuring dozens more in a horrific West African accident.
The truck burst into flames at busy intersections after colliding with a truck in the suburb of Wellington, turning the night sky into orange, photos and video presentation. A Freetown mortuary has found 94 bodies, the Freetown mayor said on his Facebook page.
"I have never seen anything like it in all my years working as a surgeon," said Moustapha Kabba, head of Connaught Hospital, the city's largest medical center. “We have a lot of serious injuries. Lots of burning. Many bodies. ”
Almost all the doctors in the area rushed to the hospital and treated the victims all night, he said. On Saturday, medical personnel were trying to find enough IV fluids, antibiotics and other essential cold compresses. Family members gathered outside, awaiting news of their loved ones.
Crowds crowd outside the Connaught Government Hospital morgue in Freetown. (Saidu Bah / AFP / Getty Images)
At least 92 people have been injured in the blast, Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyer wrote on social media, adding, "The video and photos found on social media are shocking."
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People were crammed into the crash to pick up leaking petrol when the tank exploded, witnesses said. Anything spilled was considered a waste of society as many struggled to find gas. The accident did not seem so serious until it burst into flames.
"There are corpses all around," one of the witnesses, Jusu Jaka Yormah, told reporters in the area, who shared his WhatsApp account record. "There are people shouting, people are burning alive."
Cars near the buildings quickly burned down.
"Firefighters arrived, but there was nothing they could do at the time," Yormah said. “The fire was huge. There was nothing that they could do to prevent the inferno. ”
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"Both drivers got out of their cars and warned the public not to go to the scene," Sierra Leone's National Disaster Management Agency wrote in a statement, but people have been picking up gas from temporary boxes.
The death toll is likely to rise, warned officials, as more bodies are found in the rubble.
The president of the country, who was in Scotland on Saturday for a United Nations climate summit, posted on Twitter a picture of people standing next to cigarette butts.
"My deepest sympathies go out to the families who have lost loved ones," wrote President Julius Maada Bio, "and to those who have suffered as a result."
The accident happened about 10 miles east of the site of another major disaster, some noted: the Sugarloaf mountain mudslide, the deadliest in Sierra Leone's history, killing more than 1,000 people in 2017 and destroying thousands of homes.
A similar tank explosion has killed hundreds of people in African countries in recent years - often involving victims trying to fill a leaky fuel bottle. Two 2019 eruptions in Niger and Tanzania, for example, killed more than 165 people in total, and a similar disaster in Kenya this summer killed 13 people.