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.
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