9 car pileup at Oshawa intersection leaves one dead Saturday

A collision involving at least nine vehicles in Oshawa Saturday has left one person dead and eight in hospital, police say.

Speaking at the intersection of Ritson Road S. and Bloor Street, where the multi-vehicle accident took placeSaturday afternoon, Insp. Craig McCabe said police were called to the scene at about 12:15 p.m. and arrived to find two vehicles on fire, multiple people injured and one person dead.

Eight people were taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, he said. McCabe did not provide details on the deceased person's identity or how they were killed.

As to what happened, McCabe said only that police believethe collision occurred between southbound vehicles approaching Bloor Street from Ritson Road S.

"Collision investigation units currently on scene, attempting to determine the sequence of events that led up to this collision," he said.

Although McCabe did not confirm how many vehicles were involved in the collision, police said in asocial media post earlier in the afternoon thatthere were at least nine vehicles.

The intersection has been closed to traffic since police arrived and would likely remain so for another four or five hours, McCabe said around 4:30 p.m. Police are asking drivers to avoid the area and find alternate routes.

Bystanders, chip truck hit by debris

Some bystanders in a nearby parking lot were hit by debris from the crash, McCabe said. There were also people at a chip truck parked closeby at the time of the collision, he said, and some were injured and taken to hospital. He did not say how they became injured by the crash.

Tyler Thompson, who lives close to the intersection, said he was getting ready for a shift at the chip truck when he heard a loud "crash and scraping" outside his house.

"I came downstairs and my mom was at the back door. She told me that I needed to get over the chip truck because there was flames," he said.

Thompson said he headed over immediately and when he turned the corner he saw two women get out of a black car near the chip truck, bleeding. He called the police and tried to calm them down, he said, when he heard car tires popping from the heat of the flames from the wreck.

"So I started screaming, trying to get everybody away from the [chip] truck, because there's big propane tanks behind that truck," Thompson said. "The black car that came through the parking lot was probably within six feet of hitting those propane tanks."

If that would have happened, nobody that was in those cars would have walked away," he said.

Fire crews arrived shortly after the collision to extinguish allflames at the scene.

Thompson, and several other people CBC spoke to in the area,said the intersection has lots of blind spots and is notorious in the neighbourhood for speeding vehicles and collisions.