The Nice seafront, usually packed with tourists setting up for a day at the beach, was silent on Friday morning.

Windows were shut tight and all cafés and shops closed as residents barricaded themselves inside their homes. The few who ventured outside to walk their dogs did so silently, sometimes hugging their neighbours as they crossed paths.

At every street corner, hurdles of tourists sat on their luggage as the sun rose, waiting for taxis to take them back to the airport. Julie Holland, an American on holiday in Europe had booked a flight straight back to Orlando. She was having dinner with her children when the truck drove at full speed through the masses of people on the esplanade. “We heard screams, and people started running into the restaurant. We hid in the kitchen, behind a stove.”

“As soon as the gunfire stopped we went through the back door to a hotel down the street. A policeman eventually escorted us back to our hotel at around three in the morning. There were bodies everywhere. My daughters saw bodies. Lots of them.”

Further down the road, Marc, the janitor of a building near the seafront, sat on his porch, fighting back tears. He was walking home after the fireworks when panic broke out on the esplanade.

“There were people screaming, families, bodies everywhere.” He nods to a man pacing up and down the street, crying over the phone. “He was with his kids last night. They barely made it. He hasn’t hung up the phone since yesterday. He’s still trying to figure out what the hell happened.”

Nice’s famous Promenade des Anglais has been on lockdown since the events. Police have been set up at every entry and white blankets have been set up as forensic teams hurry to examine the bodies. On the street, behind the barricades, shattered glass and survival blankets testified to the chaos of the previous night.

A man in a white blanket, haggard and dazed, limped down the street as neighbours tried to hold him up. “He’s lost his whole family,” said an elderly woman crying through her sunglasses.

An Italian living in Nice, Marco Barsotti, was watching the fireworks with his girlfriend on Thursday evening. “People started running everywhere. We saw the truck whizz past us, so we jumped back on to the beach to protect ourselves. People kept falling on our heads because they were running towards the sea and didn’t see the gap.”

It was only when the couple tried to cross the street back to their seafront apartment that they saw the carnage. “There were a dozen bodies around us,” he said. Barsotti, in a reflex action, took out his phone and started filming. The timestamp reads 10.46pm.

Jaqueline Lacour and her companion, George Pellet, were sitting on their beachfront balcony watching the fireworks when chaos broke out. “We were about to put away our camera when we saw a huge white truck plough into the crowd,” she said.

“We could hear the awful thump every time a body hit the front of the vehicle. One man right in front of us was literally thrown into the air … people were screaming.

“A group of teenagers were trying to hide on the beach. A man stayed next to a body for what seemed to be hours, he kept screaming: ‘Help me, help me!’ It must have been one of his family members. People would hail ambulances and the guys would pop their heads out and signal that the next one would stop.”

In front of the Mediterranean University Centre, where emergency psychological help was being offered to witnesses and victims with non life-threatening injuries, men and women sat smoking cigarettes in silence. A man stood hitting his head against a barricade before a firefighter escorted him gently inside the building.

Everywhere, there were looks of consternation, shock, and horror. Paul, a seafront resident watched families try to cross a street covered in bodies. “I saw a mother covering her child’s eyes, telling him to keep them tightly shut. The dad had a toddler in his arms and had buried his face in his T-shirt for him not to see anything.”

Their upstairs neighbour, an elderly woman, Jaqueline Armand also witnessed the horrifying scene. “I left Algeria to flee this. It’s come back to haunt me.”