Keystone-SDA
Forty-five people were injured on Friday in the explosion of an assistance station in Rome, heard throughout the city and due a priori to a gas leak when a tanker truck supplied the station.
(Keystone-ATS) The explosion, which occurred at the start of the morning in the district of Prenestino-Centocelle, in the East, made the windows tremble with many buildings in the Italian capital.
“I saw the devastating effects of a very powerful explosion which caused very important damage not only in the service station, but also all around, exploding windows … even damaged a school nearby,” said Rome’s mayor, Roberto Gualtieri.
“According to firefighters, everything started from a gas leak,” he added.
The fire was a priori launched by the gas leak at the time when a tank truck supplied the Essency station. “It’s as if a bomb had exploded,” Ennio Acquilino, regional firefighters director, described to AFP.
While the Essency station was supplied with liquefied oil gas (LPG), the fuel underwent a “blue” (from English “Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion”), that is to say a rapid transformation of the liquid state in the gas state, causing the explosion, said Mr. Acquilino.
The Rome prosecutor’s office and firefighters must still conduct an investigation to establish the causes of the accident with precision.
Burns and smoke
The police have extracted a person from a car on fire, the commander of the gendarmerie Andrea Quattrocchi told AFP. And the roof of an ambulance stole several meters following the explosion, according to testimonies collected on site.
Among the injured are 24 civilian people in the area as well as 21 among the rescuers, including 12 members of the police and six firefighters.
Two people were hospitalized for burns and smoke inhalation. Their vital prognosis is committed, reported the Italian agency AG.
Many videos circulating on the internet show large flames against the background of detonations with the fuel pump and a column of black smoke and thick rise in the sky above the eastern periphery of the city.
“I first thought of an attack,” said Antonio Palomba to AFP who felt the pressure of the detonation on the windows of his van, near the station.
“The explosion was really very strong, I felt my skin burn,” Michele Secu, 23, told AFP who works in a sports center located near the place of the explosion.
Fabio Balzani, the director of this center, who had to be evacuated, said that if the fire had occurred a few minutes later, the consequences could have been disastrous.
“If he had started at 8:30 am or later, it would have been a massacre, a disaster,” he told AFP, adding that a sixty children were expected for a summer camp in the center and that around 120 people had reserved the swimming pool that morning.
Tears in his eyes, he described the affected area, including his sports center, as a “battlefield”. Police completed the neighborhood to allow firefighters to work and they also evacuated two buildings that were closest to the explosion.
“I am carefully the consequences of the explosion this morning,” wrote the Giorgia Meloni government on X, ensuring that they are in contact with all the authorities involved, including the mayor of Rome.
