Mexico Trucker Online

Editors Note: This story is full of contradictions and I imagine the opposition will spin it to suit their positions. The fact remains, nobody is for certain. Ammonium Nitrate is not an explosive. AN mixed with fuel oil is highly explosive, as we all know. I cannot imagine the two being mixed together for transport under any circumstances unless this is a patented product of ORICA, the shipper. But those who say the truck wasn’t placarded, I would tend to discount. Most chemical plants anywhere in the world require carriers to placard the loads before leaving, or at least their signage says that.

CELEMANIA, Mexico — The last photos David Herrera took for the daily El Zócalo de Monclova before he was killed Sept. 9 were destined for the front page. Herrera, 42, worked the “nota roja,” a fierce beat in a newspaper culture that plays up gore. The head-on collision between a pickup and tractor trailer was full of it.


In one of his pictures, a man’s severed arm protrudes from a plastic bag full of ice. The big rig was on fire. Three bodies needed to be pulled from the wreckage.

Few in the crowd that gathered to gawk or lend a hand realized that the trailer carried 1,000 sacks of ammonium nitrate mixed with fuel oil. At 50 pounds per sack, that was 25 tons of explosives.

A particularly eerie shot Herrera took minutes before the cargo detonated caught the mood of the crowd. The tractor trailer burns in the background. A woman holds a cell phone camera up to snap a picture. A man has his arm around a woman. Another carries a backboard for the injured.

The blast killed 28 people, including Herrera and most of those in that photo. It injured 130. It dropped a rain of shrapnel on this small farming town, but somehow spared Herrera’s camera.

Residents of this tiny farming community still are picking up the jagged pieces. State and federal authorities are investigating. The trucking company denies it failed to post warnings.

And three newsrooms in the nearby industrial city of Monclova are mourning lost colleagues.

A pecan grower, who said he lost a third of his crop, still is pulling heavy chunks of metal out of his grove and yard, some of it 500 yards from the 6-foot-deep crater in the center of the two-lane highway that cuts through the town.

“Imagine if that hit you in the chest,” said the grower, Hiram Corona Villarreal, 60, eyeing a particularly ugly scrap from a scattering of pieces that included a 20-pound chunk of intake manifold.

The pickup apparently was on a Sunday evening beer run when it smacked head-on into the larger vehicle. (Fault then has been determined and it was not the truckers fault)

Most of those who rushed to help — passers-by and residents soon joined by emergency responders and reporters on the night beat — didn’t hear the two fleeing tractor trailer drivers yelling about explosives on board. Some who heard stayed on the scene anyway.

“There wasn’t any kind of warning sign on the truck, advising us to stay away from danger, so we went to put out the fire, but we couldn’t,” said Ricardo Ontivera Medellín, 57, a laborer. ( I would imagine they had burned off)

He and a few other men commandeered a water truck used for road construction. For a time, they were able to calm the flames, but the pump ran out of fuel and the fire burned out of control.

Forty minutes after the crash, the explosion unleashed a force so strong it squeezed an ambulance like a tin can, blew a baby out of a parent’s arms like a beach ball, and broke windows hundreds of yards away.

There was a deluge of shrapnel and body parts, according to photographs and witnesses. The injured flooded a hospital in Monclova, taken there in ambulances, cars and pickup beds.

“The mutilation, the amputation, it is terrible, it is terrible,” recalled Armando Castro, a manager of the hospital.

Some of the men Ontivera worked beside to try to extinguish the fire were killed.

“I give thanks to God for another opportunity to live,” he said from his home, recuperating from a fractured leg, broken ribs, loss of hearing, and an abdominal wound from flying shrapnel.

The bishop from the capital city Saltillo decried the blast during a memorial Mass at the site Sept 23, two weeks later. He called for tougher and enforced restrictions on carrying hazardous materials, as well as mine safety. The state is still reeling from a 2006 explosion that killed 65 coal miners. (Mexicotrucker.com concurs with the Bishop)
“I want the people responsible for this put in jail,” Néstor Rolando Ortiz, 33, who lost his 13-year-old son, told the bishop.

Responsibility seems to hinge on what constitutes adequate warning. Corona, the pecan grower, was one of the few people who said he heard the drivers’ warning and ran.

Orica, one of the largest manufacturers of explosives in the world, maintains that its product was properly marked as hazardous by the trucking company Fletes y Traspaleos when it left the town of Cuatro Ciénegas, a Monclova-based company spokesman, Benjamín Ruíz, said in an e-mail.

There were sacks of ANFO explosive headed to the west coast area of Colima, Ruíz said.

“The truck had signs,” he said. “In fact, trucks are not permitted to leave the plant if it doesn’t have the warning signs.”

Meanwhile, Jesus Meza, 20, is counting his blessings on the crime beat.

He drove two of his colleagues to the accident scene, about 30 minutes from Monclova. Andrés Ramírez, 22, who had become a father the day before and worked for La Prensa de Monclova, sat in back; Carlos Ballesteros, 26, of El Tiempo de Monclova, was in front.

Meza said he lagged behind when they arrived to put batteries in his camera as Ramírez and Ballesteros sprinted toward the wreck.

Herrera was already there. A father of two, he had taken a break from reporting to study law but had returned to the “nota roja.”

Soon after, the blast roared.

“I don’t know why it didn’t have batteries, perhaps because of God,” Meza said.