The industrial town of Nnewi, Anambra State was thrown into mourning Thursday as an explosion at an industrial gas plant killed at least four identified persons so far and injured four others.
The explosion occurred at the Inter Corp Oil limited (LPG Gas Plant), a member of Chikason Group at about 11 am and earlier reports said at least 100 persons died in the subsequent inferno.
According to an eye-witness, the fire incident started when a truck was discharging its load of gas without waiting for the mandatory cooling time. It was gathered that the tanker was discharging at a time when customers were refilling their gas cylinders.
The source stated that all the customers who went to the gas plant to get a refill were burnt to ashes while some of the victims who were in the neighbourhood and passers-by also got caught in the inferno. The rescue workers had difficulty in gaining access into the factory where majority of the victims were trapped.
These unconfirmed tales lent more credibility to earler estimates of the casualty figures closer to 100 than the four deaths officially released later.
The charred bodies of the victims and other badly burnt persons in the vicinity of the gas plant were taken to Nnamdi Azikwe University Teaching Hospital (NAUTH), Nnewi.
All efforts made to alert the Anambra State Fire Service of the fire incident did not succeed until the damage was done but a fire officer, Mrs Mary Ofia defended the fire service personnel in Nnewi when she claimed that the Nnewi fire truck was vandalized by an angry mob when they went for an operation at Nkpor.
Apart from lives lost to the inferno, many buildings and over fifty vehicles around the gas plant were equally set ablaze.
In his account, one of the survivors, Ikechukwu said: “My mother was preparing pepper we wanted to use to cook tomorrow after she returned from the market; the next thing we heard was the explosion that rocked the entire vicinity.
“I ran for my life and escaped with minor injury; but my mother was not lucky. She was not as fast as myself and when the fire subsided a little bit, the next thing I saw was her dead body. Look at the chicken we planned to kill tomorrow for Christmas. A similar thing happened at another residence where a woman and her daughter were lucky to remain alive after suffering some degrees of burn”.
The Vice Chairman of Anambra state Red Cross, Prof Peter Katchy who headed a team of Red Cross rescue operations, said that he was extremely worried about the presence of many filling stations in residential areas in the state.
He pointed out that the situation would have been worse if the affected gas plant was situated in thickly populated areas, pointing out that the Red Cross and the Anambra State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA) would declare war on owners of filling stations sited in residential areas in the new year.
-Vanguard
