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The
Los Alfaques Disaster was a lorry accident which happened on
11 July 1978 in Alcanar, near Tarragona in Spain. A
chemical truck with 25 tons of liquefied propylene, a highly
flammable product, left the road and ended close to the Los
Alfaques Campsite, located between the road and the sea.
After hitting a small building, the truck exploded in a 1000°C
fireball, killing 217 and injuring more than 200, most of whom
were foreigners on holiday.
The day
was warm and the early summer Spanish sun shone high over the
tiny resort of San Carlos de la Rapita. Most of the 600
French, German and Belgian tourists at Los Alfaques Campsite
were eating a leisurely lunch in front of their tents and
trailers or at picnic tables under the shade of palm and
cypress trees. Others were dozing off for a holiday siesta.
Groups of children played among the sunbathers on the narrow
beach.
At
exactly 2:36pm, the 38-ton tanker truck carrying the propylene
gas from nearby Tarragona to an industrial refinery in central
Spain, came round the long bend of the road behind the camp at
40mph and skidded out of control. Perhaps already on fire, it
crashed into a retaining wall, rolled and, as it exploded,
spewed torrential fountains of fire that washed across most of
Los Alfaques. Flames towering hundreds of feet high engulfed
holidaymakers and their gear, setting off a secondary round of
blasts from exploding butane cookers and car gas tanks. Parts
of the tanker were blown almost half a mile away. Trailers
were burnt to the frames in an instant, like paper models.
Campers ran into the water to douse the flames on their bodies,
only to be burned even more severely by the chemical reaction.
Not since
a pair of jumbo jets collided and caught fire on a runway on
the Spanish Canary Island of Tenerife in March 1977, killing
582, had there been a burn disaster of such proportions.
Ambulances and private cars ferried maimed and disfigured
victims for emergency treatment to Tarragona, Valencia and 120
miles northeast to Barcelona. German and Swiss rescue planes
were pressed into service to transport others to specialised
burn centres in their home countries. Doctors at the time
predicted that most of the injured, burned over 90% of their
bodies, could not possibly survive.
The
morning after, embalmers performed their grisly work over open
rows of caskets, six of them the small and white coffins of
children. Some of the blackened bodies were still curled as
if to shield themselves from the heat, and many faces still
wore expressions of terror. Yet Los Alfaques would not remain
a scene of death for long. Not far away from the formation of
caskets, at the end of the camp that had escaped the blast,
surviving children had already returned to playing on the
beach.
The
official inquiry determined that the truck was overloaded. |
