At least 24 killed, dozens wounded in fireworks explosions near Mexico City: officials

Twenty – Four people were killed and at least 49 injured on Thursday when a series of explosions ripped through fireworks in a city just north of Mexico City, according to authorities.

The dead included at least four firefighters and two police officers who rushed to the scene. the first explosion, only to be killed by a subsequent wave of explosions.

Video taken from a nearby road showed a mbadive plume of smoke rising from the area of ​​explosions in the town of Tultepec. Destroyed buildings and calcined ground covered a rural part of modest houses and small agricultural parcels. Authorities said four small buildings were destroyed.

The Government of the State of Mexico declared that eight people from Tultepec had been killed along with six other emergency personnel. been identified. The state government later raised the death toll to 24, but did not specify who the other victims were in a statement posted on his Twitter account.

The first explosion occurred at 9:40 am First responders and local residents rushed to the scene to help save people. At 10 am, three more powerful explosions took place, killing some of those who had come to the rescue, according to the government statement.

Firefighters, local police and state agents were injured. The civil defense of the Mexican state said that 17 people died on the scene and that seven died later in hospitals.

Helicopters transported the wounded to several local hospitals and more than 300 police were dispatched to the scene

. The Mexican civil defense agency said that there were four explosions in total and that the explosions began in an unauthorized clandestine workshop and spread like flammable materials in the air . He said the dead apparently included a minor and a civilian defense worker.

"The problem was that after the first explosion, people were rushing to help, and when the second explosion took place, these people were killed," Puente told Milenio's information network

Many city residents make their living by making and selling light fires. homemade artifice. However, the authorities have not been able to apply the rules of security and registration.

"We can not continue to tolerate this kind of situation," said Puente

.

In December 2016, a mbadive fire on an outdoor fireworks market crowded with holiday buyers killed dozens of people

Deadly explosions of fireworks have also taken place elsewhere in Mexico. In 2002, an explosion on a market in the city of Veracruz on the Gulf Coast left 29 dead; in 1999, 63 people died when an explosion of illegally stored fireworks destroyed part of the city of Celaya; in 1988, a fireworks fire at the La Merced market in Mexico City killed at least 68 people; and in 2013, a rocket struck a truckload of fireworks for a religious procession in the state of Tlaxcala, killing 17 people

The safety measures in workshops and markets. Although regulations exist on books, many still make powerful firecrackers and bottle rockets and sell them to the public.