Explosions (Accidental)

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares119 Views

    Fuel Tanker Explosion Leaves at Least 90 Dead in Nigeria

    by

    Residents of a nearby town came to scoop up gasoline that had spilled from an overturned tanker, but then it exploded, setting off an inferno — an echo of several similar disasters in recent years.It’s become an all too common scene on Nigeria’s roads: A truck driver losing control of a fuel tanker. Residents rushing to collect the spilled gasoline, a pricey commodity. An explosion turning into a deadly inferno.Such an incident in northern Nigeria on Tuesday left more than 90 people dead and at least 50 others injured, the latest in a series of similar catastrophes in a country where road accidents with death tolls in the dozens occur nearly every month.Although road-related deaths in Nigeria are below Africa’s average, 5,000 people died and 31,000 others were injured in traffic accidents in the country last year, according to the government’s data. Poorly maintained roads, aging vehicles and loosely enforced safety regulations such as adherence to speed limits or use of safety belts have all been cited among the causes.In early September, at least 59 people died when a passenger truck and two other vehicles hit a toppled-over fuel tanker that had caught fire. In April, more than 100 vehicles burned in a similar explosion. And in July last year, at least eight people died as they were trying to siphon off fuel from an overturned truck in the country’s southwest.The episode on Tuesday night was set off when the driver of a fuel tanker swerved to avoid colliding with a truck on an expressway in the northern state of Jigawa, according to Lawan Shiisu, a police spokesman.The tanker overturned, spilling fuel onto the roadway. Then, residents from the town of Majia rushed to scoop it up, in what seemed like an easy way to collect an increasingly expensive commodity in Nigeria, where fuel prices have spiked in recent months.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      The Sunday Read: ‘The Great Freight-Train Heists of the 21st Century’

      by

      Adrienne Hurst and Sophia Lanman and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | SpotifyOf all the dozens of suspected thieves questioned by the detectives of the Train Burglary Task Force at the Los Angeles Police Department during the months they spent investigating the rise in theft from the city’s freight trains, one man stood out. What made him memorable wasn’t his criminality so much as his giddy enthusiasm for trespassing. That man, Victor Llamas, was a self-taught expert of the supply chain, a connoisseur of shipping containers. Even in custody, as the detectives interrogated him numerous times, after multiple arrests, in a windowless room in a police station in spring 2022, a kind of nostalgia would sweep over the man. “He said that was the best feeling he’d ever had, jumping on the train while it was moving,” Joe Chavez, who supervised the task force’s detectives, said. “It was euphoric for him.”Some 20 million containers move through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach every year, including about 35 percent of all the imports into the United States from Asia. Once these steel boxes leave the relative security of a ship at port, they are loaded onto trains and trucks — and then things start disappearing. The Los Angeles basin is the country’s undisputed capital of cargo theft, the region with the most reported incidents of stuff stolen from trains and trucks and those interstitial spaces in the supply chain, like rail yards, warehouses, truck stops and parking lots.In the era of e-commerce, freight train robberies are going through a strange revival.There are a lot of ways to listen to ‘The Daily.’ Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Follow Michael Barbaro on X: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Isabella Anderson, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez and Krish Seenivasan. More