According to police, one person was killed and eight people were hospitalized in a collision involving at least nine vehicles in Oshawa on Saturday.

At the intersection of Ritson Road South and Bloor Street, where the multi-vehicle crash occurred on Saturday afternoon, Inspector Craig McCabe said police were called to the scene at around 12:15 p.m. and found two vehicles on fire, several injured people and one dead.

Eight people were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries, he said. McCabe did not provide any information on the identities of the dead or the cause of death.

Regarding the incident, McCabe said only that police believe the collision occurred between southbound vehicles approaching Bloor Street from Ritson Road S.

“Accident investigation units are currently on site trying to determine the sequence of events that led to this collision,” he said.

Although McCabe did not confirm how many vehicles were involved in the crash, police said in a social media post early afternoon that there were at least nine vehicles.

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

Passers-by and chip truck hit by debris

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

Tyler Thompson, who lives near the intersection, said he was getting ready for his shift at the chip truck when he heard a loud “cracking and scratching” outside his house.

“I came down the stairs and my mom was at the back door. She told me I had to climb over the chip truck because there were flames,” he said.

Thompson said he drove off immediately and as he rounded the corner he saw two bleeding women getting out of a black car near the chip truck. He called police and tried to calm them down, he said, when he heard car tires bursting from the wreckage due to the heat of the flames.

“So I started yelling and trying to get everyone away from the (chip) truck because there were big propane tanks behind the truck,” Thompson said. “The black car driving through the parking lot was probably only six feet away from those propane tanks.”

If that had happened, none of the occupants of those cars would have escaped,” he said.

Shortly after the collision, firefighters arrived to extinguish all flames on site.

Thompson and several other people CBC spoke to in the area said the intersection has many blind spots and is notorious in the area for speeding and collisions.