Several were feared dead near Sierra Leone’s capital after an oil tanker exploded at a gas station. The explosion happened while large crowds had gathered to collect the leaking fuel, officials and witnesses said.

The explosion occurred early Saturday after a bus struck the tanker in Wellington, a suburb just to the east of Freetown.

President Julius Maada Bio, who was in Scotland attending the United Nations climate talks Saturday, deplored the “horrendous loss of life.”

“My profound sympathies with families who have lost loved ones and those who have been maimed as a result,” he tweeted.

“My government will do everything to support affected families.”

Vice President Mohamed Juldeh Jalloh visited the scene of the blast later Saturday.

A total of 100 people have been admitted for treatment at hospitals and clinics across the capital, deputy health minister Amara Jambai told Reuters. 

People who went to collect petrol leaking from the damaged car were among the victims, according to Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, the port city’s mayor, in a Facebook post. 

“We recovered 80 bodies from the site of the accident last night with our ambulances,” a Red Cross rescue worker told AFP news agency, adding that rescue operations were still ongoing on Saturday morning. 

Many women, men, and children with “serious injuries” were treated by a nurse at the hospital where the victims were transferred.

“We’ve got so many casualties, burnt corpses,” said Brima Bureh Sesay, head of the National Disaster Management Agency, in a video from the scene shared online. “It’s a terrible, terrible accident.”

Previously, in Sub-Saharan Africa, tanker truck accidents have killed dozens of individuals who came at the site to collect spilled fuel and were injured by secondary blasts. 

A tanker explosion in eastern Tanzania killed 85 people in 2019, while a similar accident in the Democratic Republic of Congo killed roughly 50 people in 2018.