Fuel tanker explosion kills over 90 in Sierra Leone

“The video and photo footage making rounds on social media are harrowing,” wrote Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyer.

At least 92 others were injured, she added. Witnesses said people had crowded around the crash to collect leaking fuel when the tanker blew up, setting ablaze nearby cars and buildings.

“There are dead bodies all around,” one witness, Jusu Jaka Yormah, who lives near the scene, told reporters at the site, who shared a recording of his account in a Whatsapp voice message. “There are people screaming, people burning alive.”

Many people had run over to collect fuel, he said. Anything spilled was viewed as wasteful in the wreck that didn’t seem severe until it burst into flames.

“The firefighters came, but there was nothing they could do by then,” Yormah said. “The blaze was so much. There was nothing they could do to contain the inferno.”

The death toll is likely to rise, officials warned, as more bodies are recovered from the charred debris.

The West African nation’s president, who was in Scotland for the United Nations climate summit Saturday, tweeted an image of people gathered around the smoking wreckage.

“My profound sympathies with families who have lost loved ones,” President Julius Maada Bio wrote, “and those who have been maimed 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, which claimed more than 1,000 lives in 2017 and destroyed thousands of homes.

Similar tanker blasts have killed hundreds of people across African nations in recent years — usually involving victims trying to bottle the leaking fuel. A pair of 2019 explosions in Niger and Tanzania, for instance, killed more than 165 people combined, and a similar calamity in Kenya this summer killed 13.

Abdul Samba Brima in Freetown contributed to this report.