A multiple vehicle crash on the Kara Bridge along the Lagos Ibadan expressway triggered a severe traffic gridlock on Friday morning, locking down movement on the busy corridor and pushing a long backlog of vehicles all the way to the Lagos boundary. Rescue and recovery teams from the Federal Road Safety Corps and the Lagos State traffic authorities were deployed to the scene, where crews worked for hours to clear the wreckage.
According to a statement from the Federal Road Safety Corps Lagos Sector Command, the first crash occurred at about five minutes past midnight on the outbound carriageway heading towards Ibadan. It involved five articulated trucks and a Toyota Sienna vehicle, with a total of seven adult males caught up in the collision on that stretch of the expressway.
Officials said the situation deteriorated further when other vehicles, reversing in an attempt to escape the initial wreck, ran into a second crash that involved about six vehicles. That secondary collision effectively collapsed all movement along the affected section, leaving motorists with no clear way out of the Kara Bridge area as the queues built up behind them.
The Lagos traffic and road safety officials confirmed that one person was killed in the incident, while another sustained injuries. They said the primary trucks involved in the crash had since been removed from the carriageway, and that two of the vehicles had been recovered as a lane was reopened to ease the pressure.
To manage the disruption, the agencies said they had begun transloading the cargo from the damaged trucks, mounted a contraflow on the opposite side of the road, and issued travel advisories through traffic radio and their other channels. Motorists were directed to alternative routes to reduce delays while the recovery work continued at what officials described as ground zero.
The authorities linked the scale of the gridlock partly to the heavy pressure on Lagos road infrastructure, noting that road transport carries the overwhelming share of the movement of goods and services in the state. They added that separate breakdowns elsewhere in Lagos earlier the same morning, including a truck with mechanical faults and a broken down trailer on another bridge, had compounded the congestion before those obstructions were cleared.