Nigerian firefighters battled Friday to put out flames pouring from a burst oil pipeline a day after a huge explosion that Red Cross officials said killed 100 people.
An excavator accidentally pierced the pipeline, creating a lake of petrol that ignited into a huge fireball which engulfed a local school, cars and shoppers in the Lagos suburb of Ijegun around midday on Thursday. The inferno raged through the night.
Some witnesses said about 50 people were killed on the spot by the explosion and the flames were so thick that no one could get close to help survivors.
Red Cross official Sule Mekudi told AFP that about 100 people were believed to have died in all. There was no confirmation of the toll however from police or other authorities and some local residents said it could be lower.
The blast erupted near a school and the area was littered with shoes and bags belonging to pupils.
Chinedu Eze, 19, was writing an exam in the Ijegun Comprehensive Junior High School when the explosion erupted. He told how local residents broke down the wall in front of the school to help pupils escape the fire.
Local people threw sand and water at the giant flames in a bid to help firefighters extinguish the blaze which sent a huge cloud of black smoke into the sky.
Firefighters concentrated their efforts on preventing the fire from reaching a petrol filling station, which was surrounded by a muddy pond of water.
“When the Caterpillar driver came, the people here warned him there was a pipeline under the ground. He said he’d be careful, but the minute he started work this happened,” said Jimoh Hazan, a middle-aged man sat with several female relatives in white plastic chairs in front of the remains of his house.
“There was a terrible action — people came to loot us while we were running away from the fire,” said Hazan, another resident.
Pipeline fires are commonplace in Nigeria, Africa’s biggest oil producer, in part because of poor pipeline maintenance but also because of thieves who vandalise pipelines to siphon off petrol to sell on the black market.
On December 25, around 40 people burnt to death in a fire at a pipeline in a creek in Lagos after it was vandalised by looters. Exactly one year earlier, more than 200 people died scooping fuel from a vandalised pipeline in another Lagos district.
More than 1,000 villagers burnt to death in 1998 in Jesse, near the southern Delta state oil city of Warri, following the vandalisation of a fuel pipeline. Victims were suspected of scooping petrol to sell on the black market.
State-run oil giant Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has campaigned against pipeline vandalisation. It says between 400 and 500 acts of vandalism occur every year on its pipelines.