TLAHUELILPAN, Mexico — Gerardo Perez returned Saturday to the scorched field in central Mexico where he’d seen an illegal pipeline tap burst into flames to see if he could recognize missing friends. He couldn’t. Only a handful of the remains had skin. Dozens were burned to the bone or to ash when the gusher of gasoline exploded, killing at least 71 people.
Perez said he and his son bypassed soldiers and ignored warnings to stay clear of the geyser Friday evening in the town of Tlahuelilpan in Hidalgo state, about 62 miles north of Mexico City.
“We’re stubborn,” he said. But as Perez neared the spurting fuel, he was overcome with foreboding. He recalls telling his son: “Let’s go … this thing is going to explode.”
And it did, with the fireball engulfing locals collecting the spilling gasoline in buckets, jugs and garbage cans. Video footage showed flames shooting high into the night sky, and screaming people running from the explosion, some themselves burning and waving their arms. Perez and his son made it out.
By Saturday evening the death toll had risen to 71, according to Hidalgo Gov. Omar Fayad. Officials said at least another 85 were injured and dozens more were missing.
Forensic experts were separating and counting charred heaps of corpses while anguished relatives and friends of those presumed dead gathered around the scene of carnage.
Just a few feet from where the pipeline passed through an alfalfa field, the dead seem to have fallen in heaps, perhaps as they stumbled over each other or tried to help one another as the geyser of gasoline turned to flames.
Closer to the explosion, forensic workers marked mounds of ash with numbers.
On Friday, hundreds of people had gathered in an almost festive atmosphere in a field where a duct had been perforated by fuel thieves and gasoline spewed 20 feet into the air.
State oil company Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, said the pipeline, which supplies much of central Mexico with fuel, had just reopened after being shut since Dec. 23 and that it had been breached 10 times over three months.
The tragedy came just three weeks after 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 2018, an average of about 42 per day. The crackdown has led to widespread fuel shortages at gas stations throughout the country
as Pemex deviates distribution, both licit and illicit.
Lopez Obrador vowed on Saturday to continue the fight against a practice that steals about $3 billion per year in fuel.
“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.
He said the attorney general’s office will 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. He called on townspeople to give testimony not only about Friday’s events in Hidalgo, but about the entire black-market chain of fuel theft.
