By ALBERTO ARCE and PETER ORSI
Injured and bleeding, mothers carrying infants fled from a maternity hospital shattered by a powerful gas explosion Thursday, and rescuers swung sledgehammers to break through fallen concrete hunting for others who might be trapped.
At least two people were killed and more than 60 injured, Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera said at a news conference. The known dead were a woman and a child. Officials earlier said at least four people had been killed.
Mancera said 70 percent of the hospital had collapsed and the priority was to continue digging in search of any trapped survivors. Authorities said they had confirmed that none of the children registered in the hospital were trapped, but said it was possible that others who had come for appointments could be.
The city’s health secretary, Armando Ahued, said the adult victim was a 25-year-old woman and the child was a newborn, between 2 and 3 weeks old. He said seven infants and seven adults were in serious condition at area hospitals.
Thirty-five-year-old Felicitas Hernandez wept as she frantically questioned people outside the mostly collapsed building, hoping for word of her month-old baby, who had been hospitalized since birth with respiratory problems.
“They wouldn’t let me sleep with him,” said Hernandez, who had come to the city-run Maternity and Children’s Hospital of Cuajimalpa because she had no money. Later, authorities told her to check at another hospital where she reported finding her baby uninjured.
The explosion occurred at 7:05 a.m. when a tanker truck was making a routine delivery of gas to the hospital kitchen and gas started to leak. Witnesses said the tanker workers struggled frantically for 15 or 20 minutes to repair the leak while a large cloud of gas formed.
“The hose broke. The two gas workers tried to stop it, but they were very nervous. They yelled for people to get out,” said Laura Diaz Pacheco, a laboratory technician.
“Everyone’s initial reaction was to go inside, away from the gas,” she added. “Maybe as many as 10 of us were able to get out … The rest stayed inside.”
Workers on the truck yelled: “Call the firefighters, call the firefighters!” said anesthesiologist Agustin Herrera. People started to evacuate the hospital, and then came a devastating explosion that sent up an enormous fireball and plumes of dust and smoke.
Herrera saw injured mothers walking out carrying babies. He said there had been nine babies in the 35-bed hospital’s nursery, one in very serious condition before the explosion.
“We avoided a much bigger tragedy because the oxygen tanks right beside (the area) didn’t explode,” Herrera said.
The most affected parts of the hospital were the neonatology, reception and emergency reception units, he said.
Miguel Angel Garcia smoked a cigarette outside Hospital ABC-Santa Fe, trying to calm his nerves while he waited to see his wife and new baby daughter, who had been moved there.
Garcia, 22, had been driving a bus when he heard about the explosion at the hospital where his wife had given birth to their second child just the day before. He dropped off his passengers, then his bus and took off for the hospital.
“When I arrived and saw it in pieces, I thought the worst,” Garcia said. He waited for an hour before authorities told him his wife and daughter had been taken to the other hospital in the nearby neighborhood of Santa Fe. A nurse there told him both were fine, but he hadn’t been allowed to see them yet.
As the day wore on, people arrived at Hospital ABC offering diapers and baby formula. There was an hour-long wait to donate blood.
It was the closest hospital to the explosion and received 31 patients, including 17 children. There were seven babies with serious injuries in intensive care, said Dr. Moises Zielanowski, the hospital’s director of operations, as well as four adults in serious condition. Injuries included burns, fractures and bruises.
He said the hospital was working to identify six of the babies who arrived unaccompanied and without identification.
The gas truck driver and two employees were hospitalized but were in custody, said a city spokesman, who could not be quoted by name because she was not authorized to speak to the press.
The explosion sent a column of smoke billowing over the area on the western edge of Mexico’s capital and television images showed much of the hospital collapsed, with firefighters trying to extinguish fires.
“There was a super explosion and everything caught on fire,” said Ismael Garcia, who lives a block from the hospital.
Garcia ran to the hospital and said he and others made their way to the nursery. “Fortunately, we were able to get eight babies out,” he said.
Rafael Gonzalez of the Red Cross said one 27-year-old man arrived at the agency’s hospital with burns over 90 percent of his body, and he was transferred to another hospital.
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Associated Press writers E. Eduardo Castillo, Katherine Corcoran, Emilio Lugo and Christopher Sherman contributed to this report.
