Residents of the small village of La Villita in the Jalisco municipality of Tala were woken in the early hours of Sunday morning by a fierce odor of gasoline that burned their throats and made their heads ache.
It soon became clear that the Pemex underground duct that skirts the village and cuts through its surrounding sugar cane fields had suffered a massive perforation in the middle of the night.
As the sun came up, villagers were greeted by the sight of a 50-meter jet of gasoline spiraling into the sky from a small fissure in the 16-inch wide pipeline.
State Civil Protection officials and Mexican soldiers were the first to arrive at the scene. When Pemex employees got there, they immediately put the blame on criminals siphoning off gasoline – a common occurrence in many parts of the country, according to the state-owned oil company.
Residents of La Villita were not instructed to leave their homes but around 100 decided to abandon their properties because of the strong smell. Authorities ruled out any possibility of explosion.
Pemex workers had fixed the leak by mid afternoon but did not speculate as to how much gasoline escaped from the pipeline.
Locals told reporters that it was commonplace to see unmarked pipas (gas trucks) going in and out of farms in the area, presumably to sell stolen gasoline. Policing in the region is minimal, they said.