Forensic experts on Saturday attempted to separate and count charred heaps of corpses in central Mexico after a massive fireball erupted at an illegal pipeline tap, killing at least 73 people.
At least 74 more were listed as missing as relatives of the deceased and onlookers gathered around the scene of carnage.
The leak was caused by an illegal pipeline tap in the small town of Tlahuelilpan, about 100km north of Mexico City, state oil company Pemex said.
Photo: EPA-MLA
Video footage showed dozens of people in an almost festive atmosphere gathered in a field where a duct had been breached by fuel thieves. Footage then showed flames shooting high into the air against a night sky and the pipeline ablaze. Screaming people ran from the explosion, some themselves burning and waving their arms.
“Ay, no, where is my son?” wailed Hugo Olvera Estrada, whose 13-year-old son, Hugo Olvera Bautista, was at the spot where the fire erupted.
Wrapped in a blanket outside a clinic, the man had already gone to six hospitals looking for his child.
After returning home from school on Friday, the boy went to join the crowd scooping up gasoline, his father said.
Olvera Estrada believed he was influenced by older and supposedly wise men from the town of about 20,000.
The tragedy came just three weeks after Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador launched an offensive against fuel theft gangs that have drilled dangerous, illegal taps into pipelines an astounding 12,581 times in the first 10 months of last year, an average of about 42 per day.
In a news conference on Saturday morning, Lopez Obrador vowed to continue the fight against the US$3 billion-per-year illegal fuel theft industry.
“We are going to eradicate that which not only causes material damages, it is not only what the nation loses by this illegal trade, this black market of fuel, but the risk, the danger, the loss of human lives,” he said.
The attorney general’s office would investigate whether the explosion was intentional — caused by an individual or group — or whether the fireball occurred due to the inherent risk of clandestine fuel extraction, the president said.
He also called on townspeople to give testimony not only about Friday’s events, but about the entire black market chain, including who punctures the pipelines, who informs locals about collecting fuel in containers and how fuel is then put to personal use or sold.
Lopez Obrador launched the offensive against illegal taps soon after taking office on Dec. 1 last year, deploying 3,200 marines to guard pipelines and refineries.
On Friday, when authorities heard that fuel traffickers had punctured the pipeline, an army unit of about 25 soldiers arrived and attempted to block off the area, Mexican Secretary of Defense Luis Crescencio Sandoval told reporters.
However, the soldiers were unable to contain the estimated 700 civilians — including entire families — who swarmed in to collect the spilled gasoline, witnesses said.
The soldiers had been moved away from the pipeline to avoid any risk of confrontation with the crowd when the blast occurred, about two hours after the pipeline was breached, Sandoval said.
Lopez Obrador did not fault the soldiers, saying: “The attitude of the army was correct. It is not easy to impose order on a crowd.”
US Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen tweeted that her department “stands ready to assist the first responders and the Mexican government in any way possible.”
Another pipeline burst into flames earlier on Friday in the neighboring state of Queretaro as a result of another illegal tap.
Pemex said the fire near the city of San Juan del Rio was “in an unpopulated area and there is no risk” to people.
Additional reporting by AFP
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