A loud bang, then fire swallowing a row of shops. That is how residents of Kubwa describe the moment a car rammed into a gas retail station on Sunday morning, setting off the Kubwa gas explosion that left Liberty Junction smouldering before sunrise had properly broken.
The Kubwa gas explosion happened at about 6.15am along Arab Road, near Liberty Junction, when the vehicle lost control and struck the outlet. Flames spread within minutes, tearing through nine shops and a police traffic post standing nearby.
By the time firefighters brought the fire under control, the car had been reduced to a blackened shell. Its driver and a child travelling with him were pulled out alive. The driver was injured and rushed to hospital for treatment.
A resident of Dantata Estate, about two kilometres from the scene, said the force of the blast reached homes far beyond Liberty Junction. “The explosion was loud enough to wake people from their sleep, and we could feel the buildings shaking,” the resident said, adding that neighbours spilled outside wondering what had happened.
The makeshift police post was left displaced amid scattered debris, and that a section of drainage close to the affected shops was torn open by the impact. Shelter stands and signposts around the junction were also destroyed.
Emergency teams moved quickly after the Kubwa gas explosion. Personnel from the Federal Fire Service, the FCT Fire Service, the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps and the police were all on ground within the hour, working to stop a fire that sat dangerously close to a cluster of trading stalls.
No fatalities were recorded. That is fortunate, not guaranteed. Petrol and gas outlets across Abuja and other Nigerian cities routinely sit metres from shops, homes and bus stops, a pattern that has produced deadly explosions before, from Kano to Lagos’s Abule-Ado disaster in 2020, which killed more than a dozen people. Reports this week put Sunday’s incident as roughly the fifth notable fire outbreak in Abuja since the year began, spanning markets, fuel stations and industrial sites.
The incident has also renewed questions about the siting of fuel and gas facilities close to shops, homes and transport corridors, an issue that safety advocates have repeatedly raised after previous explosions across Nigeria. Nobody died in the Kubwa gas explosion on Sunday, but the outcome could easily have gone the other way.
For now, traders around Liberty Junction are counting their losses, sweeping through ash where their stalls once stood, while the scorch marks left by the Kubwa gas explosion serve as a reminder of how close the morning came to a very different headline.
