Fire in the Dawn Sky

By Otto Friedrich

An inferno kills hundreds and devastates a teeming shantytown

THE DEVIL GOT UP EARLY THIS MORNING, the headline in Ovaciones said afterward. Madrugo el Diablo.

He got up at exactly 5:42 a.m., just when the coming day seems to hesitate between darkness and dawn. Suddenly a torrent of fire from an exploding gas tank surged more than 300 ft. into the sky over the Mexico City suburb of San Juan Ixhuatepec, splashing it with hellish waves of orange, yellow, red, black. The chill dawn air became searing hot.

Alberto Aquino Hernandez, 28, a truck driver for one of the area's smaller gas companies, had just arrived at the gas-distribution center operated by Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex). "I was counting my cylinders of liquid gas when everything exploded," he said later. "The explosion knocked me off my truck. There was fire everywhere. I started running. My clothes were on fire, my jacket and shirt. My hair was on fire. Somehow I managed to smother the flames, and then a bus stopped and took me to a clinic."

Antonia Moreno was getting her husband Rafael, a warehouse janitor, off to work. "The earth shook and we heard thunder," she recalled. "We could see flames all over the sky and a lot of black smoke." The couple fled with two of their children (two others were spending the night with their grandmother). They dashed out of their tin-roofed, corrugated-cardboard hillside house and began running. They saw their neighbors running too, many in their nightshirts or underwear. "Some people were half-naked, and they burned their feet because the ground was so hot," Antonia Moreno said. "Nobody had time to pick up anything. We began to climb the hillside because the heat was really unbearable. All the little houses at the bottom of the hill caught fire. We thought it was the end."

The series of explosions not only destroyed four spherical tanks, each holding at least 420,000 gal. of liquefied gas, but also sent enormous steel shards spearing into houses. Then came several more blasts as 48 smaller containers exploded. One 50-ft.-long propane cylinder soared through the air and crushed a house half a mile away. In all, more than 30 acres of working-class housing were destroyed, another 30 heavily damaged.

The death toll kept climbing as the most seriously burned succumbed. At week's end the official figures were 365 dead, 2,000 injured. A third of the injured were not expected to live. It was the worst disaster in Mexico since an earthquake killed more than 500 people in 1973.

It was 7:30 a.m. before fire fighters could get the flames sufficiently under control for the first rescue workers to enter the devastated area that its people call San Juanico. They found corpses carbonized in pitiful gestures of self-defense. Some were huddled together; others lay alone in their beds, arms raised in helpless protest.

Most of the dead had been so badly burned that they could not be identified. Often nothing remained but charred bits and pieces. Rescue workers brought out the remnants in plastic bags. By Tuesday evening, 272 coffins were taken to the cemetery in the nearby barrio of Caracoles, where Caterpillar tractors dug two trenches about 200 ft. long and 10 ft. deep. The coffins were stacked in the mass grave, covered with lime and then buried. A crowd of 10,000 clutched flowers and murmured prayers.

On the day of the mass funeral--which was also the 74th anniversary of the Mexican revolution and therefore had to be commemorated, after a moment of silence, by a marathon and a parade--Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado and several top officials helicoptered into ruined San Juan Ixhuatepec.

"From the air," reported TIME'S Andrea Dabrowski, the only journalist on the mission, "the ravaged area looks like a surrealistic patchwork, with a few brick and adobe houses still standing defiantly erect alongside the skeletons of completely scorched buildings. Down on the deserted streets, a choking gray dust now covers everything. A stray dog searches for its owner and snaps at anyone who tries to peer through what was once a window. The destruction seems haphazard. A completely undamaged kitchen with a green refrigerator opens into the hulk of a demolished bedroom. Fragments of lives are scattered everywhere, here a flowered water jug, there a statue of the Virgin Mary, her severed head resting a few steps away from her folded, praying hands."

The 100,000 evacuees took shelter in more than 40 temporary rescue centers. President de la Madrid toured one of these and watched swarms of children and their families gulping beans, rice and tortillas. "We are with you," he said. The government's relief effort was fast and effective, particularly for a nation that has been afflicted by recession, budget cutting and widespread corruption. Some 5,000 police and federal troops sealed off San Juan Ixhuatepec to prevent looting (27 looters were arrested). An additional 3,000 health workers, with 450 ambulances, sped the injured to hospitals and clinics. Within two hours after the government's first radio appeals for food, clothing and blood, the contributions began pouring in.

On behalf of Washington, U.S. Ambassador John Gavin sent a check for $25,000, adding praise for "the generosity of individual Mexicans toward their countrymen." The compliment was well earned. On the morning of the explosions, neighbors in the surrounding community of Tlalnepantla took up a collection and then brought to San Juan Ixhuatepec boxes of crackers, canned vegetables and medicines. Next day they established themselves just outside the military cordon and distributed supplies to anyone who asked for them. By Wednesday there was such a flood of food and clothing that the radio called for a halt.

Strangely enough, nobody seemed to know exactly how the explosion in the 18-year-old plant had occurred. Pemex officials first insisted that a fire had started somewhere outside the Pemex facilities, but they equivocated on the details.

However it happened, the disaster was all too predictable. There are always risks in building homes so near a gas-storage plant, but teeming Mexico City (pop. 17 million) overflows with migrants and squatters. The city has about 30 gas plants, and most of them are surrounded by shacks and shantytowns. To move just one of the larger plants would cost an estimated $300 million.

Pemex's safety record is spotty. A 25,000-gal. gasoline-storage tank exploded in the central Mexican city of Tula last January. No one was injured then, but one died and 33 were hurt in another explosion in June in the state of Tabasco. A week later, a pipeline leak in Veracruz intoxicated 16. Inhabitants of San Juan Ixhuatepec claim a fire broke out there last June, but neighborhood protests got nowhere. Pemex Spokesman Salvador del Rio denies this, saying that there were no recent fires and that maintenance was "done continually."

Once the fires died down, the survivors returned to sift through the ruins. Raul Pena Duarte, 44, stared numbly at the rubble of a three-room house that had sheltered him, his wife, four children from ten to 16, his mother-in-law and her sister. "All my family died there," he said. "I had gone to work. They were all asleep. A piece of one of the tanks went through there and then everything burned. I think I will leave here. What's left here?"

At week's end the government announced that it would bulldoze 122 damaged houses still standing in the blast area. Then the whole place will be turned into a park.

-- By Otto Friedrich. Reported by Janice C. Simpson/Mexico City

With reporting by JANICE C. SIMPSON