"It Was Like Napalm"

A gas-truck explosion devastates a seaside campsite

It was approaching midafternoon, and a sparkling, early-summer Spanish sun still shone high over the tiny Mediterranean resort of San Carlos de la Rapita. Most of the 600 French, West German and Belgian tourists at Los Alfaques (the Sandbars) campsite were eating a leisurely sitdown lunch in front of their tents and trailers or at picnic tables under the shade of palm and cypress trees. Others were dozing off for a vacation siesta. Groups of children romped among the sunbathers basking on the narrow beach.

At exactly 2:36 p.m., a 38-ton tanker truck carrying 1,518 cu. ft. of highly combustible propylene gas from nearby Tarragona to an industrial refinery in central Spain peeled around the long bend of the highway behind the camp at 40 m.p.h. and skidded out of control. Perhaps already on fire, it crashed into a retaining wall, rolled and, as it exploded, spewed torrential fountains of fire that washed across most of Los Alfaques. Flames towering hundreds of feet engulfed vacationers and their gear, setting off a secondary round of blasts from exploding butane cookers and automobile gas tanks. Parts of the tanker were blown almost half a mile away. Trailers were burnt to their frames in an instant, like paper models. Campers ran into the water to douse the flames on their bodies, only to be burned even more severely by the chemical reaction.

"It was like napalm, it was an inferno," said a French visitor from Toulouse who had been washing dishes in a trailer that was spared at the edge of the camp. "People were running everywhere, screaming, some of them on fire." More than 100 were killed on the spot, most burnt beyond recognition. Another 150 or more lay writhing in the havoc, grotesquely scorched. In all, the fire storm that devastated Los Alfaques had killed 144 by week's end, and left some 75 injured, many critically. Not since a pair of jumbo jets collided and caught fire on a runway on the Spanish Canary Island of Tenerife in March 1977, killing 582, had there been a burn disaster of such proportions.

Ambulances and private cars ferried maimed and disfigured victims for emergency treatment to Tarragona, Valencia and 120 miles northeast to Barcelona. West German and Swiss rescue planes were pressed into service to transport others to specialized burn centers in their home countries. But doctors predicted that most of the injured, burned over 90% of their bodies, could not survive.

The morning after, embalmers performed their grisly work over open rows of caskets, six of them the small and white coffins of children. Some of the blackened bodies were still curled as if to shield themselves from the heat, and many faces still wore expressions of terror. Yet Los Alfaques would not remain a scene of death for long. Not far away from the formation of caskets, at the end of the camp that had escaped the blast, surviving children had already returned to playing on the beach.

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