TLAHUELILPAN, Mexico -- An illegal pipeline tap exploded in central Mexico late Friday, killing at least 73 people.
Officials said at least another 74 were injured and dozens more were missing. Fifty-four bodies had yet to be identified Saturday night.
Just a few feet from where the pipeline passed through an alfalfa field, the dead seemed to have fallen in heaps in the moments after gasoline shot 20 feet into the air and then ignited.
The geyser was caused by the illegal tap in the small town of Tlahuelilpan, about 62 miles north of Mexico City, according to state oil company Pemex. Over the course of two hours, an estimated 600 people arrived to fill containers with gasoline.
Video footage showed dozens of people in an almost festive atmosphere gathered in a field where the pipe had been breached by fuel thieves. Footage then showed flames shooting into the air against a night sky. Screaming people ran from the explosion, some on fire and waving their arms.
Lost shoes were scattered Saturday around the scorched field, as were plastic jugs and jerry cans that the victims had carried to gather spilling fuel.
"Ay, no, where is my son?" wailed Hugo Olvera Estrada, whose son -- Hugo Olvera Bautista, 13 -- was at the site of the explosion. Wrapped in a blanket outside a clinic, the man had already gone to six hospitals looking for his child.
After returning home from middle school, his father recounted, the boy from the town of about 20,000 people went to join the crowd scooping up gasoline.
"The older men brought him," Olvera Estrada said.
Mexican Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio said 25 military personnel arrived on the scene Friday to stop people from getting too close, but that they had been ordered not to engage with fuel thieves out of fear that an escalation could result in harm to unarmed civilians or soldiers being beaten by a mob.
"We don't want this sort of confrontation," Cresencio said.
Cresencio said there are 50 soldiers stationed every 12 miles along the pipe. They patrol 24 hours a day.
Gerardo Perez Gutierrez said civilians ignored soldiers' warnings to stay clear of the pipeline because "we're stubborn."
Perez Gutierrez said he and his son also bypassed the soldiers Friday, but that he quickly changed his mind, fearful that the pipeline would explode.
He said he returned Saturday to the scorched field to see if he could recognize any bodies, but only a handful of the remains still had skin.
The tragedy came just three weeks after new President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador opened an offensive against fuel thieves who drilled dangerous, illegal taps into pipelines 12,581 times in the first 10 months of 2018, an average of about 42 per day.
In an early morning news conference Saturday, Lopez Obrador vowed to continue the fight against fuel thefts that cause $3 billion in losses each year.
"We are going to eradicate that which not only causes material damages, it is not only what the nation loses by this illegal trade, this black market of fuel, but the risk, the danger, the loss of human lives," he said.
He said the attorney general's office will investigate whether the explosion was intentional -- caused by an individual or group -- or whether the fireball occurred because of the clandestine fuel extraction.
He also called on townspeople to give testimony not only about Friday's events in Hidalgo state, but about the entire black market chain, including who punctures the pipelines, who informs locals about collecting fuel in containers, and how fuel is then put to personal use or sold.
The war against fuel theft was a theme repeated by people in Tlahuelilpan, which is crossed by pipelines and sits just a few miles from a refinery.
"What happened here should serve as an example for the whole nation to unite behind the fight that the president is carrying out against this ill," said municipal health director Jorge Aguilar Lopez.
That blast burned people and scorched homes, affecting 5,000 residents in an area 6 miles wide in San Martin Texmelucan.
Lopez Obrador opened the campaign against illegal taps soon after taking office Dec. 1, deploying 3,200 marines to guard pipelines and refineries.
His administration also shut down pipelines to detect and deter illegal taps, relying more on delivering fuel by tanker truck. There aren't enough trucks, however, and long lines have formed at gas stations in several states.
Mexicans on Saturday expressed both sympathy and consternation toward the president's war on fuel gangs.
Arely Calva Martinez said the recent shortages at gas stations raised the temptation to salvage fuel from the gusher.
Her brother Marco Alfredo, a teacher, was desperate for gas to drive 90 minutes back and forth to work when word spread on Facebook that fuel was spewing into the field.
Marco Alfredo and another brother, Yonathan, were in the field when the fire started. They haven't been seen since.
"I think if there had been gas in the gas stations, many of these people wouldn't have been here," Calva Martinez said while holding a picture of her brothers.
Tears streamed down Erica Bautista's cheeks as she held up her cellphone with pictures of her brother, Valentin Hernandez Cornejo, 24, a taxi driver, and his wife, Yesica, both of whom are missing. Valentin faced "enormous lines" for a limited ration of gas, she said. Then he received a phone call alerting him to the fuel spill.
"We want to at least find a cadaver," Bautista said.
Information for this article was contributed by Amy Guthrie and staff members of The Associated Press.
A Section on 01/20/2019