A Mass Slaughterhouse

In the midst of the evening rush hour in Osaka, Japan's second largest city, a carload of repairmen from the municipal gas company pulled up to a subway construction site in a thronged downtown district. They were there to check reports of a leak. Minutes after they had begun work, the driver of the service car switched on his ignition again, and a sheet of flame enveloped the vehicle. As the driver struggled free of the flames, hundreds of homeward-bound pedestrians crowded into the area. As it turned out, the blazing car was only a deadly preface. Moments after it caught fire, the first in a series of massive gas explosions tore through the crowds. "When I regained consciousness," recalled one survivor, "I lay flat on the street about 40 ft. from where I had stood." Said another: "It was a mass slaughterhouse."

Human bodies were hurled as high as telephone poles by the blasts, and severed limbs flew through the air. Six-ft. steel-and-concrete slabs, used to cover the subway tunnels under construction below street level, were tossed about like giant dominoes, crushing some of the victims. Fire quickly spread through 30 buildings along the street. The final toll: 73 dead, 281 injured.

What makes the explosions all the more distressing is that they may have been caused by the same conditions that exist in a number of Japan's crowded, fast-growing cities. The normal method for subway construction, now under way in Tokyo and Sapporo as well as Osaka, is to excavate along street routes, then cover the tunnels with concrete-and-steel slabs. While workmen install the tracks below, vehicles can move over the slabs. But the combination of digging, construction and traffic vibrations is frequently too much for utility lines, and cracks appear. The trapped gas that caused last week's explosions apparently came from three wide cracks later discovered at the construction site in a main 2 ft. in diameter.

At Expo '70 (see MODERN LIVING), only ten miles from the blast, the Japan Gas Association Pavilion was closed for 24 hours. The Pavilion's chief attraction is an exhibit entitled "World of Laughter."

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