At least 12 people were killed in multiple accidents across Uttar Pradesh due to thick fog, police said on Monday, despite Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s plea for people to “obey the traffic rules”. 42 people were injured.
Accidents have occurred in Auraiya, Kanpur Dehat, Unnao, Kanpur, Kannauj, Mainpuri and Kasganj districts of the state since Sunday night, police said.
According to a statement from the state government, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has “called on people to obey traffic rules” and stressed that “accidents must be checked, especially due to the heavy winter fog”.
He also directed officials to “implement an interagency coordinated road safety action plan to prevent accidents”. A bus driver and two passengers were killed and nine others were injured when a bus collided with a truck near Umrain on the Agra-Lucknow highway in Auraiya on Monday morning, police said.
Police said that when the accident happened, the truck jumped over the highway barrier to save a car, and the Lucknow-bound bus hit due to poor visibility.
In another accident on the Agra-Lucknow highway on Monday morning, a bus of the Uttar Pradesh Transport Corporation overturned near Birhaul in Kanpur. Alok Singh of ACP Bilhaur said 18 people were injured in the accident. In Kannauj district, seven schoolgirls were injured after their jeep was hit by a truck near Chibramau. Kannauj police said the students were heading to a university to sit their exams.
In Kanpurdhat, two people died after their vehicle hit a power pole on the side of the road and overturned, Akbalpur police said, adding that thick fog was the cause of the accident. In Unnao, a truck full of pipes overturned in Bangarmau, killing the driver and seriously injuring a cleaner.
Another truck collided with a dump truck on Purwa-Dahi Chowki Road in Unnao district, injuring three people.
In Mainpuri, due to poor visibility, two villagers were killed instantly when their tractor and a cart full of potatoes fell from a culvert in Ballarpur, which is restricted by the Bachwan police station, police said. In Kasganj, two people died at the scene on Sunday night and another was injured on Monday after their car crashed through a railing and fell 50 feet into the Kali River basin in dense fog.
At the same time, due to low visibility caused by dense fog, a series of collisions of more than a dozen vehicles occurred on National Highway No. 2 in the Shikohabad area of Firozabad district. Four people were injured.
