Montreal’s Trudeau airport fire injured seven passengers, travelling on a jet from Morocco in the latter part of the Monday afternoon. It was around 5 pm when a mobile conveyor belt burst into fire. The belt is used for loading luggage on to flights.

About 250 passengers on the Royal Air Maroc Boeing 767 hustled off as seven of them complained that they were suffering from smoke irritation. The evacuation process left the lower bodies of three people injured after the fire had caught the rear if the plane.

Stephanie Lepage, the spokesperson of the airport, said that the passengers were evacuated strictly for safety reasons. On the other hand, emergency official Marc-Andre Gagnon informed that the seven people who got injured consisted of a couple of men and five women who had been transported to a hospital. The men had refused to be transported, he said. The fire, nevertheless, was promptly extinguished by the fire department at the airport. The Canadian Transportation Safety Board has already started an investigation on the reasons of the fire. The investigation will also find out if the evacuation process had been executed properly.

Another spokesman of the airport, Francois-Nicolas Asselin, informed that it was the decision of the crew to evacuate the way it was done. Whether they could have used another method of evacuation or not can only be decided by the Royal Air Maroc authorities, he said. Mr Asselin spent around 15 years in the business of aviation. He confirmed that it was the first time when, according to him, such an incident took place at Montreal-Trudeau.

The estimated amount of the damage caused by the fire is yet to be available. The plane, on the other hand, remains to be out of service at the moment as it awaits the investigators to arrive. The driver of a luggage transport shot a video which shows people sliding for safety as they were just feet away from the flames.

Video courtesy: YouTube/CBS This Morning