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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | December 2006 
Explosion at Mexican Fireworks is 32nd of 2006
 Associated Press
| | Seventy-three-year-old Corazon, who has made her living for almost 15 years making firecrackers, works at a makeshift firework factory in Bocaue, north of Manila. Sales have been high in the run-up to New Year's Eve, when millions of Filipinos will risk their limbs exploding fireworks to greet the coming year in a tradition that maims many and in some cases kills. (AFP/Joel Nito) |
TOLUCA, Mexico – An explosion occurred at a small fireworks factory on Wednesday, killing two employees and injuring a third. It was the 32nd such explosion in the central state of Mexico this year.
The Department of Defense, which issues licenses to legal fireworks factories, was investigating but had not determined a cause of the explosion at a 30-square-meter (320-square-foot) licensed factory in the town of San Diego Huhuecalco, about 55 kilometers (35 miles) southeast of Mexico City, said state civil protection director Arturo Vilchis.
The dead and injured were the only three in the factory at the time, he said. The explosion was the 32nd of 2006, and brought the yearly toll from fireworks accidents in the state to 19 fatalities and 68 injured.
One of the explosions happened in September at Mexico's most famous fireworks market, a cluster of licensed open-air stands in the town of Tultepec, just miles outside Mexico City. No deaths were reported in that explosion, or in an explosion at Tultepec that occurred a year before.
Poor safety conditions have led to many fireworks explosions in recent years. Accidents also are common in illegal workshops that often are operated in family homes.
On New Year's Eve 2002, a spark set off boxes of fireworks in the Gulf port city of Veracruz, killing 28 people and consuming a city block. An explosion of illegally stored fireworks in 1999 killed 63 people, injured hundreds and leveled part of downtown Celaya in west-central Mexico. At least 68 people were killed in 1988 in a fireworks explosion in a sprawling Mexico City market. |
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