At least 15 dead and 40 injured after petrol tanker explodes
A petrol tanker explosion killed at least 15 people as they tried to retrieve oil from its wreck in Haiti.
The Caribbean nation has been hit by fuel and food shortages that have driven people to desperate measures like eating biscuits made of mud to survive.
When a truck transporting petrol overturned in Miragoane, a port city of 60,000 people in southern Haiti, today, people flocked to salvage the leaking fuel.
At least 15 of them died and 40 more were injured when the tanker then exploded, according to interim Prime Minister Garry Conille.
In a statement on X, he said: ‘I am very sorry for the explosion… The government stands in solidarity with all the victims and their families and plans evacuations by helicopter.’
Many of the injured were taken to hospitals with serious burn injuries.
Those with severe injuries would be transferred to other regional hospitals for treatment, Emmanuel Pierre, national head of Civil Protection, said.
Another 75 people died in Haiti’s second city, Cap Haitien, in 2021 when a fuel tanker overturned while swerving to miss a motorbike.
That blast launched a fireball through several homes and businesses that had been built with little space between each other.
Haiti’s economy has long struggled under the rule of corrupt dictators and the burden of repaying loans taken out to compensate slaveowners for property lost when it gained independence from France.
As a result, Haiti has gone from one of the wealthiest of Europe’s colonies to the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.
More recently, rising gang violence, particularly in the capital of Port-au-Prince, has made it difficult to import goods into the country.
Haiti never fully recovered from a 2010 earthquake that killed more than 100,000 people.
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