Dozens hurt in fuel station blast heard across Rome

ROME (AFP) — A huge explosion at a gas station in a Rome suburb on Friday left 45 people hurt, two of them seriously, and rattled windows across the Italian capital.

The blast around 8:20 a.m. (2:20 a.m. EDT) was preceded by a fire caused by a gas leak during refueling, according to Rome Mayor Roberto Gualtieri.

Gualtieri visited the charred and smoking remains of the gas and liquified natural gas station and an adjacent sports center in the Prenestino neighborhood of eastern Rome.

The explosion sent a fireball and thick black smoke into the air, and was heard on the other side of Rome, shaking windows and causing some residents to worry that a bomb had gone off.

“The explosion was really powerful. I felt my skin burning,” Michele Secu, a 23-year-old who worked at the now-destroyed sports center, told AFP.

“I was 15 meters (about 50 feet) from the petrol station … it exploded in front of me. I don’t know how I managed to run, to escape,” he said.

Before the explosion, emergency services were called to investigate the gas leak and had evacuated the immediate area, including a children’s summer camp.

Twenty-one of the 45 injured were from the emergency services, including 12 police officers, Rome police told AFP.

Two men were hospitalized and in life-threatening condition, one with burns on 55% of his body, local health authorities told the AGI news agency.

Like a bomb

Fabio Balzani, head of the sports center, said if the fire had occurred just a bit later it could have been disastrous.

Some 60 children had been expected at the summer camp and around 120 people booked to use the swimming pool, as relief from a heatwave that has baked the city for the past week.

“It would have been a massacre, a catastrophe,” Balzani told AFP.

Andrea Quattrocchi, the local chief of the Carabinieri police force, also said the timely intervention of his team was crucial.

“They extracted a person alive from a burning car,” who was taken to hospital, he told reporters.

Witnesses said an ambulance exploded in the fire.

Ennio Aquilino, regional director of the Lazio fire department, said the gas station explosion was caused by a “BLEVE” — a boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion — of the liquified natural gas.

A BLEVE is caused by the rapid vaporization of a pressurized liquid, normally when the vessel containing it is ruptured in some way.

“The effect is as if a bomb has gone off,” Aquilino told reporters.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni offered her sympathy to the injured and praised first responders for their quick work that helped avoid “this tragic event from having even more serious consequences”.

—

By LISA DUSO Agence France-Presse