(Reuters) -Three firefighters died while trying to quell a rapidly spreading fire after a truck with 60 tons of liquefied natural gas crashed in the Mongolian capital, officials said on Thursday.
The country’s National Emergency Management Agency said in a statement on its website that three of its employees lost their lives, and 10 citizens were injured in the fireball in Ulanbaatar in the early hours of Wednesday.
The agency had said on Wednesday that six people had died, including the firefighters.
More than 600 firefighters in 100 vehicles were needed to put out the fire, it said.
Photos posted by the agency on Facebook showed the charred and crumpled frames of the truck, a car and a billboard, plus burnt cars and the broken windows of a number of apartments.
A preliminary assessment suggested the truck crashed into a small car, sparking the explosion before a second blast ripped off part of the truck and killed the firefighters at the scene, Mongolia’s Deputy Prime Minister S. Amarsaikhan told TenGer TV.
The fire quickly engulfed several nearby buildings, including a residential building, local online news outlets said.
An unidentified resident told TenGer TV that his windows shattered and his balcony was destroyed in the disaster.
Another said she and other residents had to break out of their building after flames engulfed the exit.
Eyewitness Erdenebold Sukhbaatar said he thought the blast just 100 metres (yards) from his home was an earthquake or airplane crash.
As he rushed to his living room, he told Reuters he saw an explosion and the fire quickly spreading to the nearby apartment building. The 40-year-old lawyer live-streamed the event on Facebook.
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne, Liz Lee and Xiaoyu Yin in Beijing and Nicoco Chan in Shanghai; Editing by Michael Perry and Neil Fullick)
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