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Mexico’s Toll Rises in Blast As Hunt Ends For Survivors
(about 11 hours later)
MEXICO CITY — The sudden explosion at the headquarters of Mexico’s state-owned oil company killed at least 32 people and injured 121, officials said on Friday, a day after the powerful blast shattered windows, shook the ground and sent thousands of employees fleeing into a panicked downtown.
MEXICO CITY — Hundreds of rescue workers ended their search for survivors on Friday at the site of an explosion that tore through an office building of Mexico’s state-owned oil company a day earlier, as the death toll rose to 33. The head of the company said early indications about the cause suggested that it was an accident.
Officials still gave no information about the cause of the explosion. It occurred just before 4 p.m. on Thursday in the basement of an administrative building next to the 52-story tower of Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex. Company officials said there was significant damage to the first floor and mezzanine of the building, and witnesses said they saw rescue workers helping trapped employees who had been pinned under falling debris, while others dragged out the injured and the dead. Officials said the dead included 20 women and 12 men.
“All lines of investigation are open; we are not going to discount anything,” said Emilio Lozoya Austin, chief executive of the oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex. “But what it seems like, from what experts can observe, is that it was an accident.”
“I saw them take out three people covered in blood,” said Trinidad Díaz, 31, the owner of a restaurant a block from the explosion. “And after that, ambulances started arriving, one after the other.”
Mr. Lozoya, at a news conference Friday morning and in interviews throughout the day, emphasized that the investigation was continuing, and that no clear cause had been found. Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, visiting a hospital where many of the 120 people who were injured by the explosion were being treated, asked the public to avoid speculating on the cause.
The blast — in a highly protected but decaying office complex — comes in the middle of a heated debate over the future of Pemex, a national institution and a corporate behemoth that has been plagued by declining production, theft and an abysmal safety record that includes a major pipeline explosion almost every year, like the one in September that killed 30 workers.
Nonetheless, in a country with little trust in its institutions, the pressure on the government to provide details is mounting as reporters and Twitter users ask pointed questions about why officials have not said what exploded or why. Rumors of bombs and of censored Twitter accounts of Pemex employees swirled online Friday, leading many to note that the blast revealed once again that when there is a lack of transparency, the void tends to be filled with imagined horrors.
Experts, while cautioning that it was too early to tell what had gone wrong, said the company would inevitably face more severe scrutiny as Mexico’s Congress returned to work in the coming weeks. The country’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, has pledged to submit a plan for overhauling Pemex, opening it to more private investment and perhaps greater consolidation. But with the blast, deliberations about the company could become more elemental.
“We are all into conspiracy theories,” said Gabriel Guerrero, a political analyst in Mexico City. While the government seems to have communicated relatively well so far, regularly updating the death toll, he said, “the real test will come over the next few days and weeks.”
“You pull all of this together and you say, well, if they can’t even guarantee safety in their own building, their own headquarters, what does that tell us about the company?” said Duncan Wood, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “It tells us there are things seriously wrong there. It tells you things need to be seriously shaken up.”
Independent explosives experts said it often takes more than 48 hours to identify the cause of a large blast that, in this case, collapsed several floors and shattered windows across a wide area. Jimmie C. Oxley, a chemistry professor and explosives expert at the University of Rhode Island, said by telephone that while some forensic investigators may have an idea by now of what happened, it often takes more time to come to a conclusion with colleagues.
George Baker, director of Energia.com, an energy research institute in Houston, said that previous safety scandals at Pemex had been used by Mexican leaders as an argument for making controversial changes. In 1992, he said, a major explosion in a residential Guadalajara neighborhood — caused by gas leaking into the sewers — was followed by calls for change, and a plan to break Pemex into smaller pieces.
All of this is made more difficult by the amount of rubble at the site, Professor Oxley said, noting that photographs posted online showed a tangle of concrete, wires and collapsed floors.
“The provocation, the pretext was that we had this terrible thing happen and now we are going to have a response from Pemex,” Mr. Baker said, adding that the explosion on Thursday would also now become part of the political calculations over what to do about the company.
Typically, she said, explosions at buildings are caused by one of two things: gas that is suddenly ignited, or a bomb. Bombs tend to create craters and cratered metal that point investigators to a specific location. If, for example, a basement garage was affected at the Pemex building, Professor Oxley said, investigators would look for signs of a car bomb.
“This may be used, may be manipulated, used as a pretext to do something,” he said. “Who knows what that something is, but they may exploit it to do something they were going to do anyway.”
“It’s hard to imagine a bomb carried by a person being very large,” she said.
At the scene, employees who were visibly shaken said the explosion felt like a bomb or an earthquake. After a deep rumble, a plume of smoke rose skyward and people rushed into the streets. Four rescue helicopters landed in the area to remove the dead or injured, while a half-dozen more helicopters hovered overhead. Soldiers, police officers and ambulances filled the area, and streets were quickly cordoned off.
Gas explosions, like the one that killed several hundred people in Guadalajara in 1992, can be harder to identify because there is not necessarily a single ignition point. Also, Professor Oxley said, since the explosion on Thursday occurred on the lower floors of a building (an administration building near the Pemex tower), “it’s important to know if you had the heating system of the building there, or how that was arranged.”
A team of three emergency responders who had entered the building soon after the blast said that it appeared that two basement floors and parts of three upper floors had collapsed. Papers were strewed everywhere, and the scent of dust lingered in the air. Those on the emergency team said another rescue worker who had gone inside told them he saw eight lifeless bodies.
Government officials have said the blast happened in an area near the base of the building where workers checked their timecards. Before news of the explosion emerged, company officials said there was an electricity problem there, but Professor Oxley said electricity alone would lead to a fire, not an explosion, though if gas had been leaking, a small spark could have been enough to set off a colossal blast.
Just before dark, local news outlets reported that Mr. Peña Nieto had arrived. He had already demanded an investigation and expressed remorse, using his Twitter account. “I profoundly lament the death of our fellow workers at Pemex,” he said on Twitter just before arriving. “My condolences to their families.”
Still, not all investigations lead to answers. Recalling the case of an explosion at a mall in the Philippines that she was consulted on, Professor Oxley said she could not confirm that there were explosives present based on samples from the scene. “I don’t know there ever was a conclusion,” she said.
Pemex officials, using the company’s official Twitter account, said around the time of the explosion that its offices were being evacuated because of an electrical problem. Later, the company said forensic teams were investigating the cause, which had not been determined. “Any other explanation with respect to this is speculation.”
