Over the weekend, a small lorry transporting diesel crashed into a divider on the NKVE and caught fire. Photographs show drums on the lorry’s bed surrounded by flames and smoke.
Two major newspapers reported that the lorry was transporting diesel, but diesel in its liquid form does not easily catch fire under most circumstances. Perhaps this was one of those rare instances where all the right conditions lined up for diesel fuel to be the source of the fire here.
Or perhaps there’s something else going on. Trucks of this sort tend to also run on diesel engines, but there ARE a few truck owners that soldier on with smaller petrol powered trucks from a bygone era. We even encountered one earlier this year at a petrol station. The owner explained that the truck ran fine and the cost of replacing it with a new diesel-powered machine outweighed the benefits of diesel’s better efficiency.
So it could be that this was one of those older petrol-powered trucks that and that its own petrol was what was burning.
There’s also a possibility that the stuff in the drums wasn’t diesel. The fire & rescue department did comment that the driver was not present at the scene of the incident. Perhaps he was transporting some other undeclared flammable chemicals with him?
The incident occurred at KM 23.5 of the NKVE (Southbound) at around 11 in the morning, August the 3rd.
