Traffic was stopped early Saturday morning in the area surrounding the Ahly Club in Nasr City district in dead standstill that lasted for eight hours, after a breakage in an oil line on the Nasr Street which feeds the Moustard-Tibeen pipeline.
The broken pipeline caused large quantities of oil to leak onto the main road, stopping traffic completely from the Ahly Club to Nasr Street near the Cairo-Suez highway.
The leak started at 2am Saturday morning and lasted until 8am. The spilled oil covered an area of more than 300 square meters.
Security forces erected iron barriers to prevent cars from entering the spill area.
Head of the Eastern Nasr City Council Sayyed al-Leithy said that the oil leakage was "minor," and that the cause of the spill was unknown as of now.
"The pipeline was old and outdated. It overlaps with a number of other lines, such as electrical and water lines,” the Director General of the Nasr City Pipeline Networks Information Center Emad Eddin Mohamed said.
Eyewitnesses said that the spill occurred because a loaded truck crashed into the pavement covering the pipeline, which led to a multi-car collision because their tires slipped on asphalt, which was totally covered in leaked oil.
Five cars carrying sand arrived at the site of the spill at about 10:30am, more than eight hours after the beginning of the oil leakage, and two loader cars filled in the spill area with sand, in order to re-pave the street.
