First a horrific blast on Thursday rocked the town of Tultepec, a place already notorious for deadly fireworks accidents, and emergency workers rushed in to rescue the injured.
Then, 20 minutes later, a new series of explosions erupted around them, killing at least four firefighters, two police officers and a civil defense worker.
In all, at least 24 people died and at least 49 were injured, the Mexico State Government said.
Photo: AP
“They wanted to save lives without knowing that the same thing was going to happen to them,” said local resident Teresa Gonzalez, who heard the nearby blasts that began at 9:40am.
Tultepec, a municipality of about 130,000 people about an hour’s drive north of Mexico City, is famed for small workshops that produce many of the fireworks used throughout the region — and for repeated accidents that have killed at least 70 people over the past two years.
Guadalupe Romero, another town resident, stopped short of saying that the town’s fireworks industry should be shut down, because he knows so many of the area’s families depend on it.
However, he said that between a nearby propane gas plant and the fireworks production, “we are sitting on a time bomb.”
“Yes, we’re scared,” the 64-year-old merchant added.
The workshops that exploded were “clandestine,” Mexican Civil Protection Service National Coordinator Luis Felipe Puente said.
However, they were located within an area specifically marked out for the production of pyrotechnics.
State and federal officials had promised, after earlier disasters, to impose safety restrictions in such areas.
Along the road were brightly painted buildings labeled with “danger” warnings. There was even a guard shack inside a shabby chain-link fence.
The shops that blew up apparently did not have the required permits issued by the Mexican Army to store explosive materials, but that is the case for many of the family-based businesses.
Video images showed a massive plume of smoke rising after the explosion.
Journalists arriving later found wrecked buildings and scorched ground amid a rural patch of modest homes and small farm plots.
Helicopters took the wounded to several local hospitals, while more than 300 police were dispatched to the scene.
Fiercely protective of their artisanal industry, locals resist regulation, and on Thursday some assaulted journalists recording images of the site, destroying their cameras’ memory cards.
Safety measures at such workshops and markets have been a matter of constant debate in Mexico, where festivals big and small feature small rockets and bomblets, often at close range of spectators, and where individuals often set off firecrackers in the streets.
“We cannot continue to allow this kind of situation,” Puente told the news network Milenio.
At least 35 people were killed in a Dec. 20, 2016, explosion that leveled a fireworks market crowded with holiday shoppers, and government officials then promised to rebuild it better than ever.
Since then there have been several other explosions at fireworks shops around Tultepec. An accident in March last year killed four people. Another last month killed seven and injured eight.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema