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FREETOWN: Not less than 99 individuals had been killed and greater than 100 injured within the capital of Sierra Leone late on Friday when a gasoline tanker exploded following a collision, native authorities stated. Emergency crews labored to clear the scene on Saturday within the japanese Freetown suburb of Wellington the place a burnt human physique and the blackened shells of vehicles and motorbikes blocked the highway following the crash, a Reuters reporter stated.
The wounded had been being handled in hospitals and clinics throughout the capital, deputy well being minister Amara Jambai advised Reuters.
Victims included individuals who had flocked to gather gasoline leaking from the ruptured car, Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, mayor of the port metropolis, stated in a submit on Fb, though that submit was later edited to take away the reference.
“We`ve obtained so many casualties, burnt corpses,” stated Brima Bureh Sesay, head of the Nationwide Catastrophe Administration Company, in a video from the scene shared on-line. “It`s a horrible, horrible accident.”
Movies shared on-line shortly after the explosion confirmed individuals working by clouds of thick smoke as giant fires lit up the evening sky. Reuters was not ready instantly to confirm the pictures.
The crash supplied a significant problem for Freetown`s well being service already creaking from years of underfunding. The 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic gutted its ranks of medical workers, 250 of whom died, and the system has not recovered.
Connaught Hospital was overwhelmed with the inflow of sufferers, so a number of the injured had been moved to different places, together with a army hospital, stated Swaray Lengor, a program supervisor on the Worldwide Federation of Crimson Cross and Crimson Crescent Societies.
“The state of affairs on the hospital, particularly Connaught hospital … is overwhelming. Insufficient medical consumables and mattress capability,” Lengor advised Reuters by way of textual content. “NGO companions had been requested to help with tools, medical commodities and meals.”
The dying toll would seemingly rise, he stated.
Accidents with tanker vehicles in Sub-Saharan Africa have beforehand killed scores of people that gathered on the website to gather spilled gasoline and had been hit by secondary blasts.
In 2019, a tanker explosion in Tanzania killed 85 individuals, whereas round 50 individuals had been killed in the same catastrophe in Democratic Republic of Congo in 2018.
“My profound sympathies with households who’ve misplaced family members and those that have been maimed in consequence,” President Julius Maada Bio tweeted. “My Authorities will do every little thing to help affected households.”
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