BENGALURU: Twelve people were injured and eight vehicles were damaged in a serial accident, due to heavy fog early Thursday morning on the Nelamangala highway. The accident is a grim reminder for drivers to either leave the city late to avoid fog, or drive with fog lights.
All the 12 sustained relatively minor injuries in the pile-up on the busy Nelamangala-Tumakuru highway. With the New Year weekend coming up, many are heading out as the government has imposed night curfew and restrictions due to a spike in Covid-19 numbers.
The pile-up disrupted heavy traffic on the stretch for over two hours. Hundreds of vehicles were stranded on both sides of the highway. Nelamangala traffic police struggled to restore normalcy and had to use cranes to move damaged vehicles and clear the highway.
A senior police officer said the pile-up occurred around 6.30am, when a few vehicles, including two buses and trucks heading towards Bengaluru, collided with each other due to low visibility caused by heavy fog. A truck carrying onions and other vegetables broke down, spilling onions on to the road, leading to further chaos.
The driver and passengers of a bus and two riders escaped with minor injuries, and were taken to Nelamangala government hospital for first aid. A senior IMD official said visibility usually drops due to presence of fog, which is basically low-level clouds formed when the sky is clear. The presence of water bodies and open spaces in the vicinity determine the density of fog.
This is why fog is commonly noticed on the city’s outskirts, like Nelamangala highway or towards Devanahalli. Green cover has also increased, due to which formation of fog is leading to a drastic drop in visibility. Officials from the Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Cell have cautioned drivers to slow down on highways as visibility and fog density changes with location.
IMD officials said visibility at KIA on Thursday morning, between 5.30am and 8.30am, was just 50 metres, while visibility at HAL airport was 800 metres, between 6.30am and 8am.