This is the worst explosion in Spain, a fuel tanker truck passing by the resort, suddenly exploded, the resort 800 tourists were instantly surrounded by flames, 150 of them were directly burned to death on the spot, and even maintained a posture of dancing or eating before death!
And many of the remaining people, because of a wrong move, almost pushed themselves into the abyss of death.
How did the explosion come about, and how did the victims of the fire cope with the sudden disaster?
Let's take a look!
Deadly tanker trucks
On July 11, 1978, a seemingly ordinary fuel tanker truck set off from the refinery to Barcelona, the capital of Spain. The car was loaded with 23.5 tons of liquid propylene.
Propylene is a flammable colorless gas, produced from oil, natural gas and coal, and is the basic raw material of the three major synthetic materials, which can be used to make rubber, pigments and other items, although it is widely used, but it is also very dangerous.
Therefore, vehicles that transport such dangerous goods usually choose to drive on the road with fewer people, so that even if there is an accident, it can reduce injuries and losses.
But the driver of the tanker truck chose a very different path, and he drove on a coastal road that passed through a scenic seaside resort.
This road was chosen not because the driver wanted to see the sea, but because there was no need to pay tolls here. Although his choice saved himself a sum of money, it hurt hundreds of tourists who were in the resort area at the time.
The driver didn't notice a detail, the car he was driving at the moment was full of liquid acrylic. Herein lies the problem. According to the regulations, the loading capacity of this dangerous liquefied gas shall not exceed 85% of the total volume of the vehicle. This is because when a gas is stored in a liquid state, it expands due to the increase in temperature.
When the expansion reaches a certain level, the internal pressure exceeds the threshold, which will cause the containment of the gas to break, causing the gas to leak out, which can lead to disaster.
That is, this tanker truck is in an overloaded situation. When the car left the refinery, it was still morning, and the temperature was not high, so the liquefied gas did not expand. Therefore, the car driven by the driver is a sleeping bomb.
At around 2:30 p.m., the tanker truck passed by the resort, where some tourists were dancing on the beach. They were so engrossed that they didn't notice that white smoke had risen from the tanker truck not far away, which was a leak of liquid propylene. White smoke fills the entire beach with the sea breeze.
Soon after, an explosion suddenly sounded, scaring tourists on the beach. They looked at the source of the explosion and found that a few centimeters had been blown out of the tanker, and then the fire engulfed the tanker in an instant.
Before the tourists could react, the tanker truck exploded again, this time the explosion was extremely ferocious, directly blowing the tanker truck into two, the front part of the car continued to move forward because of inertia, and the rear of the car instantly flew out in the opposite direction, directly flew out nearly 200 meters away, and crashed into a nearby restaurant.
The flames ignited the diffuse petroleum gas, and in an instant the flames surrounded the tourists, and because the incident was so sudden, many tourists did not have time to respond, and it is speculated that the temperature at that time was as high as 2,000 degrees Celsius, which could instantly burn a large living person into charcoal.
So the scene was very weird, some people were burned to death, they still kept dancing postures, from a distance it looked like a twisted tree trunk, 150 people were burned to death in an instant, many of them didn't even feel pain, and they couldn't reflect how they died.
Some of the tourists, who were far away from the center of the explosion, did not die on the spot, but they also had flames burning on them.
These people, in a panic, made a very bad decision.
Chaotic fire scene
At the scene of the fire, a man could not bear the severe pain of being burned, so he jumped directly into the sea and used seawater to extinguish the flames on his body. When the others saw it, they did the same and jumped into the sea.
But they forget that the sea water is different from the water we usually drink, the normal water is filtered, but the salt content of the sea water is extremely high. In the case of wounds on the body, exposure to high concentrations of salt water can make the injury more severe.
Some people who jumped into the sea fell into a coma on the spot because of the intense pain from the wound and sank into the sea, and even those who endured this pain could not struggle out of the sea for a while, and could only allow the sea water to invade their wounds and cause more serious damage to their bodies.
The investigators who rushed to the scene afterwards were shocked by the scene in front of them and were speechless. A large area of buildings was blown to rubble, charred bodies lay on the ground, and investigators found that in addition to 150 people who were burned to death on the spot, 65 others died in the struggle, the death toll was 215. In fact, the police also found two other bodies at the scene, which we will talk about later.
Of the more than 200 injured people who were later taken to the hospital, dozens more died due to ineffective medical treatment, so the number of people killed in the disaster is about 270.
Nearly a quarter of those injured suffered second-degree burns, a quarter suffered third-degree burns, and serious complications occurred, and even if they survived, their quality of life would be reduced in the future, and some were disfigured and looked quite miserable.
The terrible accident shocked the Spanish public, who demanded that investigators investigate the cause of the accident. After investigating, the investigators soon found out that the cause of the explosion of the tanker truck was an overload of gas.
According to their estimates, the maximum pressure that the tanker could withstand was 30 kg per square meter, but due to the expansion of the liquefied gas loaded by the temperature, the pressure inside the tank rose to 100 kg per square meter, which was far beyond the limit that the tanker could bear, thus causing the tanker to explode.
Unfortunately, a bonfire was lit in the resort, which rekindled the leaked LPG and caused the second explosion.
According to records, there were nearly 1,000 tourists in the resort at that time, and more than 400 were unscathed, in addition to more than 500 injured and killed. This made the investigators feel incredible, according to their calculations, the explosion should have covered the entire resort, but why did they escape?
Investigators found the answer after surveying the environment at the scene.
Follow-up to the tragedy
First of all, the resort can be roughly divided into two areas. The seaside area is the area closest to the center of the explosion, and almost all the people on the beach were burned to death on the spot, and near the campsite area, there are more than a dozen buildings, and when the explosion spreads to the middle of the camping area, a tall building blocks the blast wave of the explosion, so that the people in the second half of the area can be spared, which can be regarded as a blessing in misfortune.
Once the cause of the explosion was determined, investigators moved on to pursue accountability. There is no need to think about it, the biggest person responsible is, of course, the driver of the fuel tanker, if he hadn't driven according to the prescribed route in order to save road expenses, this explosion accident would not have affected so many people.
But the driver of the tanker truck was burned to death at the moment of the explosion, and investigators could not hold a dead person accountable. So they turned their attention to the workers at the two refineries who had negligently filled the tanker trucks with liquid propylene, as well as the company that produced the tankers and the Repsol Gas Company, where the drivers worked, were punished to a certain extent.
The two workers were sentenced to one year in prison, while the two companies jointly paid 13.23 million euros (138 million yuan) in compensation to the victims' families.
But the process of finding the victim's family is not easy. Because the resort has no process to register guest identification information, and many of the victims have been burned beyond recognition, it is extremely difficult to determine their identities.
Some investigators even mistakenly identified a burnt ham as the remains of the deceased, and it took a long time to correct the error, and later the Spanish side sent experts to assist in the investigation, and the experts proposed a way to identify the remains, that is, by looking at the teeth of the remains, to guess their age and restore their facial features.
Relying on this method, investigators confirmed the identities of the vast majority of the deceased, but the identities of two people are still difficult to guess, even the two people mentioned above, and because the identities of the two deceased cannot be determined, the investigators did not count these two people in the disaster death toll.
This disaster has also sounded the alarm bell for the whole world, and it is not difficult to find that it was all kinds of mistakes in the details that led to this tragedy, and if the gas filling staff could be more serious and professional, they would not have made the low-level mistake of filling the dangerous gas.
The driver's decision to change the route at will also shows that the Spanish government's control over the transportation of dangerous goods is not strict enough, and the resort does not register the identity of tourists entering and leaving, which also brings great trouble to the follow-up investigation.
Therefore, the Spanish government has learned from the pain and formulated a series of policies, requiring tankers to be inspected after being equipped with dangerous goods to ensure that no accidents will occur, and at the same time, the drivers who drive tankers have also been more rigorously audited and trained to prevent those drivers who lack safety awareness from engaging in the work of transporting dangerous goods.
Such a policy has indeed prevented the recurrence of such disasters to a great extent, but there are still accidents of fuel tanker explosions from time to time all over the world, which shows that laws and policies can only play a certain restraining role, and it is always the parties engaged in these dangerous activities who can really prevent disasters.
If they don't pay attention to the safety of their lives, then no amount of restraint will be useless.