Four people were injured when the car they were travelling in collided with an oil tanker on the Penang Bridge in the early hours of 22 Oct.
The crash happened at Km3.4 of the mainland-to-island bound carriageway at 12.13am, according to NST. All four occupants were taken to hospital by members of the public before firefighters arrived.
Penang Fire and Rescue Department assistant operations director John Sagun Francis said the four were moved to hospital by passers-by ahead of the rescue team. “We received the emergency call at 12.13am and rushed to the scene,” he said.
Twelve firefighters were sent from the Perai station, with a fire and rescue vehicle and an emergency medical rescue services unit. Crews cleared debris from the carriageway to remove further hazards, while police and highway concessionaire PLUS were also at the scene.
Firefighters reached the crash site at 12.21am, eight minutes after the emergency call, The Star noted. The clean-up ended at 1.11am, 58 minutes after the first alert.
Five people were involved in the collision: the four occupants of the car and the 53-year-old tanker driver, who escaped unharmed. One of the injured was a 44-year-old man. The department said the identities of the other three were not available, and did not release their condition.
By the time the crew arrived, the four had already left the scene for hospital, so the firefighters’ work centred on debris and hazard clearance rather than casualty rescue.
The crash happened on the island-bound stretch of the bridge, where traffic from Seberang Perai heads towards George Town. The Penang Bridge is the older of the two road links between the island and the mainland, and rescue calls on its mainland half are normally answered by the Perai station, the nearest crew to the scene. Vehicles using that approach come from the industrial and residential districts of the mainland into the island’s city centre.
Debris from a crash on the bridge is cleared by firefighters before the carriageway is handed back to the highway operator, with police handling traffic control and the accident report. In this case the operation ran from the first call just after midnight to the final sweep at 1.11am, a window of under an hour on a road that carries commuters between the mainland and the island around the clock.
The fire department issued its statement on the incident on Thursday. No further details on how the collision happened have been released.
