A motorbike exploded in a wild crash that killed one person and injured two in the Rockaways Sunday afternoon.
The fiery collision happened in the Edgemere neighborhood on the Queens peninsula, when a 52-year-old man was driving north on Beach 45th Street and hit a pair of motorcyclists heading west along Beach Channel Drive just before 1:10 p.m. on July 17, cops said.
One of the two-wheelers caught fire upon impact and the other bike was pinned to a garden fence by the car.
An unidentified man was pronounced dead on the scene.
Paramedics brought one of the bikers, a 33-year-old man, to Jamaica Hospital in critical condition, while the car driver was brought to St. John’s Hospital in stable condition.
Police draped the fatally-injured man’s body in a white sheet on the street and cordoned off the intersection as they investigated the grisly incident.
Beach Channel Drive is a hotspot for drag racing, bystanders told amNewYork Metro on the scene.
The roughly 1-mile stretch of the thoroughfare that cuts through Edgemere has been the site of 197 crashes injuring 290 people since 2011, according to city crash data.
The intersection at Beach 45th Street where the horrific crash happened is also home to a daycare and a community farm just across the street.
The explosive carnage is the fourth serious traffic collision causing critical injuries or death on New York City streets over the weekend, following two crashes in Brooklyn and one in the Bronx.
Traffic violence has continued to rise across the Five Boroughs this year, with 25,241 injuries through July 10, up 2.5% from the same time last year, according to the latest NYPD statistics.
That’s about 133 people hurt every day on the roads, and injuries to pedestrians have jumped by a whopping 24% year-to-date, from 3,340 in 2021 to 4,138 people in 2022, according to the data.
Deaths are down slightly to 123 so far this year, compared to 129 for the same time in 2021, but that’s still a rate of nearly five people being killed each week.
