State govt confirms infant, 11 others dead

The Lagos State Government says it has confirmed a total of twelve deaths from Thursday, June 28, 2018,

Nine people were confirmed dead on the day of the accident which occurred at Otedola Bridge axis of Berger after its brake was said to have failed.

But addressing journalists in Lagos on Monday, July 2, 2018, the Lagos state commissioner for Health, Dr Jide Idris, said ten bodies were recovered from the scene of the incident as opposed to the nine initially reported, with the tenth being an infant, while two of the seven survivors later died in the hospital.

Idris noted that the other survivors of the tanker fire accident were responding to treatment.

The tanker was heading out of Lagos through the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway when the crash occurred, engulfing at least fifty vehicles.

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Many drivers had abandoned their vehicles and fled as firefighters tried to battle the raging inferno.

Traffic was stopped on both sides of the road as emergency officials battled to put out the fire and attend to those affected.

The nineteen-year-old tanker was said to have been carrying content twice its capacity before it exploded.

The Lagos state Commissioner for Transportation, Ladi Lawanson, told journalists at the Bagauda Kaltho Press Centre in Alausa on Sunday, July 1, 2018, that preliminary investigation has revealed that the accident occurred due to a combination of vehicular defect and human errors.

He disclosed that the tanker was originally designed as a 14,959kg (approximately 15 ton) drilling rig with low bed in 1999 before it was converted in Nigeria to a fuel tank carrier to carry 30 tonnes.