Hell On Earth: Tanker Truck Crashes; Spilled Lpg Catches Fire
Dashcam footage showing what real-life nightmares are made of perfectly illustrates the unfortunate moment when a situation goes from bad to worse. Yesterday morning at around 8:30 AM (China time), a tanker truck carrying liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) was involved in an accident on the Beijing-Harbin highway and came to a full stop on the right side of the road. While this might not sound newsworthy, what happened after that was essentially hell on earth.
The driver of what seems to be a Mazda CX-4 promo car had the terrible idea of advancing, most likely to park on the right side of the highway or turn around to get away from the danger. Little did he knew, the tanker truck had spilled LPG all over the road in the aftermath of the crash, thus creating a major fire hazard. It's unclear at this point what caused the ignition, but there are a few plausible scenarios, such as something could have generated a spark or there was a static discharge.
Either way, the highway was engulfed in flames in the blink of an eye and all hell broke loose. Thankfully, no deaths have been reported as a total of seven people in three surrounding cars lived to see another day with only minor wounds. While the quality of the dashcam footage is far from being stellar, you can still see people running away from the fire, including someone from inside the troublesome China-only crossover. It goes without saying the man behind the wheel of the tanker truck was the most unlucky, suffering from burns on about half of his body.
As to why the white car and the CX-4 didn't simply reverse to get away from the danger, the drivers must've panicked and decided instead to jump out of the vehicles and make a run for it. The person driving the car from where the dashcam footage was recorded did reverse, and so did the driver of a white previous-generation Audi A4 sedan you can see towards the end of the video. There were only a few cars right behind the tanker truck, so a calamity was averted.
