22 de Abril no se olvida

April 22, 2009 2:46 PM

17 years ago, On Wednesday, April 22, 1992, the 461-year old city of Guadalajara, Mexico, experienced a series of ten massive explosions occurring in the heart of the downtown Reforma district. The blasts measured 7.1 and 7.0 on the Richter scale at the University of Mexico in Mexico City some 200 miles away. The disastrous series of sewer gasoline explosions in Guadalajara, though not caused by a terrorist attack, demonstrate the potential impact of a well-planned and executed terrorist attack using a city’s sewer lines. At least 200 people where killed.

This photograph won the Premio Internacional de Periodismo Rey de España award. A graphic 8 minute video in Spanish showing rescue attempts and general devastation. Scroll down for a collection of scanned newspapers. First of five parts of National Geographic's Seconds from Disaster: Inferno in Guadalajara episode.

The cause? An electrolytic reaction between zinc and copper pipes installed too close to steel pipe gas duct corroded the pipes and caused a leak, gases built up in an inverted siphon, then a spark.

posted by dirty lies (15 comments total)

Thank god for the 'explosion' tag.
posted by synaesthetichaze at 2:55 PM on April 22

The first responders and rescuers were being extremely careful not to create sparks and detonate other explosions. Harrowing stress. Frightening uncertainty.
posted by netbros at 3:05 PM on April 22

If the 9/11 hijackers hadn't let themselves be blinded by symbolism, they could have inflicted an order of magnitude greater injury on us by crashing into the Indian Point nuclear plant.
posted by Joe Beese at 3:10 PM on April 22

No, not actually. The containment structure for a nuclear power plant is designed to survive exactly that kind of impact. It's essentially a reinforced bunker.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 3:16 PM on April 22 [2 favorites]

holy cow, I spent a summer in Guadalajara as a kid. I was pretty preoccupied in '92, can't beleive I missed this.
posted by mwhybark at 3:40 PM on April 22

my mother warned me that lighting farts was dangerous and not funny.
posted by kitchenrat at 3:51 PM on April 22

The disastrous series of sewer gasoline explosions in Guadalajara, though not caused by a terrorist attack, demonstrate the potential impact of a well-planned and executed terrorist attack using a city’s sewer lines.

Jesus Shitcocking Christ. Any terrorist attack has potentially large impact. Why must every accident and disaster include some note about terrorism? Stop scaring yourselves and you'll have less to fear, everyone.
posted by Mikey-San at 3:55 PM on April 22 [9 favorites]

If the 9/11 hijackers hadn't let themselves be blinded by symbolism, they could have inflicted an order of magnitude greater injury on us by crashing into the Indian Point nuclear plant.

[this is bullshit]

Aircraft Crash Impact Analyses Demonstrate Nuclear Power Plant’s Structural Strength
posted by Mikey-San at 4:05 PM on April 22

I think the last eight years already proved that incompetence and hubris would always trump malice and evil.

It's time to move on.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 4:17 PM on April 22

This is my first post, I will try make this my only comment.

I included the one about terrorism because it had the best information I could find in English, the link to terrorism feels to me like the time in high school that I had to write an essay on the Mexican socio-political structure and I managed to link it to my D&D campaign. Or how I was able to make half of my chemistry assignments touch on the history of pot.

A very interesting result of the explosions is that at the time all the newspapers in the city, and most in the country, were completely pro-government. There was a 5 month old independent newspaper in the city, Siglo 21, trying to do some real journalism. They were the ones that won the award with the picture of civilians rescuing a woman with a wooden door. They were the only ones that did any kind of investigation and reporting, and were ultimately the seed of a lot of very good journalism.

I was in L.A. at the time, and there was an earthquake the same day. T.V. in L.A. reported that 50% of Guadalajara had blown up, T.V. in Guadalajara talked about some minor explosions, and filled up their time with earthquake reports. It took me 5 hours of trying to be able to talk to my family. It was a shitty day.

The government reported 200 deaths, but people made their own lists and at least 1000 people went missing, mostly commuters and people going to the market. While rescue operations were still ongoing and survivors were still being found, the president, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, announced that he was visiting the city. The mayor ordered all rescue operations to stop and had all the ruble bulldozed into the craters, on top of cars, bodies and possibly survivors. He wanted to give the impression that he was under control.

A close friend was in the big Social Security Hospital waiting for his mom to come out of surgery when ambulances, pick-up trucks and dump trucks started arriving with the dead and the wounded. He was 15 or 16, and he was recruited for triage. He dropped out of school for a semester after that, he says he counted at least 60 dead just on that floor of the hospital.

I could not find the two pictures that impacted me the most. One was an urban bus on top of a 6 meter tall electrical post, entangled in the wires, with bodies inside. The other one was a telephone worker's corpse still hanging from his safety harness on top of a telephone pole.

It was a Katrina type of fuck up. I am more scared of incompetent oil companies and corrupt governments than I am of terrorists.
posted by dirty lies at 4:31 PM on April 22 [12 favorites]

The first responders and rescuers were being extremely careful not to create sparks and detonate other explosions.

The worst part is, those guys down there measuring the explosiveness of the sewer lines, coming back with "100%" readings… knowing the next person to light a cigarette, or start a car, or any other of the million of ways to create a spark… and boom.

I thought this part was particularly sobering:

"Aguirre notes that the explosions were experienced by his interviewees as sudden and nearly simultaneous. People told him that the “only indication of warning [was]…people looking down the streets and seeing a rapidly disintegrating landscape advance towards them. Those who survived turned away from the center of the street where the drainage pipe that blew up was located."

Can you fucking imagine how nuts that must have been? Any thought of busting-out some Jean-Claude Van-Dam moves are quickly put to rest: if you were above the lines, you had maybe two seconds to respond.

I'm still surprised this happened so recently.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 4:37 PM on April 22

I included the one about terrorism because it had the best information I could find in English

I'm not criticizing your post, apologies if it seems that way. I'm ranting about how people in general, including the source to which you linked, immediately jump to measuring the impact of something against the something that has been around for a long time and will be here as long as there are humans in the world. I'm tired of people acting like we should be afraid of things that, statistically, are not likely to happen to us. These are phantom panics and they're doing more damage than actual instances of terrorism.

Is it inevitable that terrorism will happen in the future? Yes.
Is it likely that it will injure or kill you? No.
Should we care about terrorism? Yes.
Should we panic all the fucking time? No.
posted by Mikey-San at 4:47 PM on April 22

I am more scared of incompetent oil companies and corrupt governments than I am of terrorists.

Precisely. Bhopal India, anybody? 8,000 people dead.

Terrorism is a joke. Union Carbide, Philip Morris, and Monsanto have killed orders of magnitude more people than Al Quaeda.
posted by tkchrist at 5:03 PM on April 22 [1 favorite]

The cause? An electrolytic reaction between zinc and copper pipes installed too close to steel pipe gas duct corroded the pipes and caused a leak, gases built up in an inverted siphon, then a spark.

A friend took me on a walk up and down the streets that were destroyed in those explosions a few years ago. Interestingly (though unsurprisingly), there are a bunch of conspiracy theories, and no one I talked to actually believed the story about gases just building up, preferring stories of illegal dumping and official cover-ups. Like the big earthquake in Mexico City, the gas explosions did a lot of damage to the government's credibility.

It was pretty clear which blocks were destroyed, because a lot of the rebuilt architecture is different than the rest of the neighborhood, set back further from the street and more modern. But also interesting was that the the devastation, though extensive, was very limited -- houses just a bit further away are still standing. The comparison to 9-11 in NYC is kind of apt, in that the physical effects were much more limited than the social and political impacts; in contrast, a strong earthquake or other natural disaster will cause far more extensive physical destruction.
posted by Forktine at 9:38 PM on April 22

Whenever I go to live to a new city, I end up doing the comparison. In San Francisco, it would be the equivalent of Market St. blowing up from the Embarcadero all the way to Castro. In N.Y. it would be like blowing up Park Ave. all along Central Park and a little bit more.
posted by dirty lies at 12:40 PM on April 23