Fuel theft leads to deadly explosion

At least 71 people killed after a massive fireball erupted at an illegal pipeline tap in central Mexico.

TLAHUELILPAN, Mexico — Forensic experts attempted to separate and count charred heaps of corpses in central Mexico on Saturday after a massive fireball erupted at an illegal pipeline tap, killing at least 71 people.

More than 85 others Saturday were listed as missing as relatives of the deceased and onlookers gathered around the scene of carnage.

A few feet from where the pipeline passed through an alfalfa field, the dead seem to have fallen in heaps, as they stumbled over each other or tried to help one another in the moments after a geyser of gasoline shot into the air Friday.

The leak was caused by an illegal pipeline tap in the small town of Tlahuelilpan, 62 miles north of Mexico City, according to state oil company Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex.

Video footage showed dozens 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 burning and waving their arms.

On Saturday, several of the dead lay on their backs, their arms stretched out in agony. Some seemed to have covered their chests in a last attempt to protect themselves from the flames; another few blackcharred corpses seemed to embrace in death.

Lost shoes were scattered around the scorched field, as were plastic jugs and jerry cans that the victims had carried to gather spilling fuel.

“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 local hospitals looking for his child.

After returning home from middle school Friday, his father recounted, the boy went to join the crowd scooping up gasoline.

Olvera Estrada believed he was influenced by older men from the town of about 20,000.

“The older men brought him,” he said.

The tragedy came three weeks after new 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.

In a news conference Saturday, Lopez Obrador vowed to fight against the $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.