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Acid Truck, Gas Truck Crash, Lead to Seeming-Worst-Case Scenario

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Quick, what’s the worst-case scenario for two tanker trucks crashing?

If you said a tanker filled with gasoline and a truck filled with acid, then you just named a real thing that happened on December 28th on the Shanghai-Kunming Expressway.

Sometime around 8am our time (or about 1pm in China), a 16-ton gasoline truck rear-ended a truck filled with sulfuric acid on the highway. The tankers spilled their contents, leading to an enormous, billowing cloud of black smoke, and, at some point, an explosion, according to a tweet from China’s The People’s Daily.

According to another (Chinese-language) source CCTV News, the crash caused one of the drivers to be trapped inside his truck, but emergency fire and rescue services were quickly able to force the door open and take him to the hospital. Surprisingly and happily, nobody was killed in this nightmare-fuel of a crash, and the man who was trapped was listed as being, if not explicitly in good condition, then at least not in life-threatening condition.

We really have to commend whatever emergency service people showed up to help the trapped man—honestly, someone who answers “Yes” to the question “Hey, want to go to a sulfuric acid and gasoline fire and stand next to an engine that will maybe explode to pull some guy out?” absolutely deserves a medal.

News Sources: Jalopnik, CCTV (Chinese language), The People’s Daily via Twitter