Mexico: Gas tanker explosion kills at least 20
Police said the truck's driver was traveling at a high speed when it slammed into a retention wall, the second of its two trailers flipping and sliding into houses closely abutting the busy highway in Ecatepec, a teeming working-class city on the Mexican capital's northeast fringe.
The driver is among those hospitalized.
Mexican media report 16 of the confirmed dead were in one three-story house near the toll highway, a major artery that connects the Mexican capital to the country's Gulf Coast. At least 27 houses and scores of automobiles were damaged by the blast and resulting fire, Ecatepec Mayor Pablo Bedoya said in his Twitter feed.
A family of four, including two children aged 11 and 6, are among the dead.
"It was a ball of fire which exploded as though they'd put a spotlight in the whole window," resident Carlos Gonzalez Silva told Mexican radio, Reuters reported.
"We opened the door and it was like fire had blown through the whole of the garden."
El Universal published photos showing the charred wreckage dozens of buildings and vehicles.
The six-lane highway remains closed in both directions.
The accident in Ecatepec comes little more than three months after a mysterious explosion — officially blamed on leaking methane gas — hit the Mexico City headquarters of Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, the national oil company. That blast killed 38 people and injured scores more.
A 5 a.m. explosion in December 2010 of a pipeline carrying refined petroleum products east of Mexico City killed 27 people and injured another 52. Authorities blamed the blast on thieves tapping the pipeline.
A 1984 pre-dawn blast at an LPG storage facility not far from Ecatepec killed as many as 600 people and injured thousands more. In 1992, other petroleum distillates reportedly leaked during a theft operation and exploded in the sewer systems of Guadalajara, Mexico's second-largest city, killing more than 200 and injuring 1,400 people.
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