Around 250 firefighters and civil protection officers from several municipalities battled bravely for 20 hours to extinguish a gasoline pipeline fire on the western outskirts of Guadalajara this week.
A senior Jalisco Civil Protection official said around 900,000 liters of magna gasoline burned away following the explosion and subsequent fire in a segment of Pemex pipeline running alongside Highway 15, nine miles outside the city beltway (periferico).
Another two million liters of fuel remained in the pipeline, meaning the geyser fire could have blazed for another three days had it not been controlled, Zapopan’s fire chief calculated.
Medics treated 15 firefighters for smoke inhalation, although only one required hospitalization.
The flame from pipeline could be viewed clearly from nearby neighborhoods, including Pinar de la Venta and La Venta del Astillero. The pall of smoke rising high into the sky was visible from a long distance away.
Air pollutants from the fire prompted the University of Guadalajara to suspend classes at the nearby Biological Sciences and Agriculture (CUCBA) campus.
Bomberos working around the clock drenched the flamazo with half a million liters of water, as well as firefighting foam to extinguish the blaze, the fire chief said.
Some of the weary firefighters got little rest, however. Scarcely hours after putting out the pipeline fire, another fierce blaze broke out at a paints and resins factory on Avenida R. Michel in the city’s Colonia Rosario. Together with colleagues from Tlaquepaque and Tonala, the Guadalajara firefighters battled the flames for more than three hours before bringing the blaze under control. The factory was completely destroyed.
The residual smoke engulfing the zone prompted the state environmental agency (Semadet) to issue an air quality alert for a two-kilometer radius around the blaze, while education authorities evacuates 1,600 students in 12 nearby schools. Traffic police closed off a 12-block area to traffic and many businesses also took the precaution of shutting up shop for the rest of the day.