At least 10 people were killed and 64 injured when pyrotechnic material exploded during a patron saint festival in the State of Mexico on Saturday night, Mexican authorities said.
The blast tore through Santa María Canchesdá, next to the Nuestra Señora de la Luz church in the municipality of Temascalcingo, which has about 66,000 residents and sits roughly 160 kilometers (100 miles) northwest of Mexico City. Hundreds of people had gathered for the fireworks display staged as part of the religious festival honoring Our Lady of Light when the pyrotechnics went off.
A Celebration Turned to Chaos
One of the year’s big nights in the small community ended as a mass-casualty emergency. The explosion involved pyrotechnic material stored near the church, and the force of the blast brought down a wall and part of a structure, trapping people underneath, according to local reports. Church walls and nearby buildings came down, and a fire reportedly broke out in the town square as debris scattered across the area.
Emergency crews rushed to the scene and spent hours picking through the wreckage, pulling people from the rubble and carrying the wounded to hospitals. Video shared on social media captured the aftermath, showing dozens of people moving through smoke and debris as they looked for survivors.
A local bishop said two priests were among the injured. Children and elderly residents were also reportedly taken to hospitals, an indication of how mixed the crowd was on a night when entire families typically turn out for the patron saint celebration. Authorities put the toll at 10 dead and 64 injured.
Investigators Search for a Cause
What set off the pyrotechnic material has not been determined. The Mexico State Attorney General’s Office has opened an investigation, and the circumstances of the blast remain under review by judicial and relief authorities working to establish how the incident unfolded.
Investigators face a difficult scene. Fireworks used in Mexican patron saint festivals are often assembled locally and brought to the celebration site in the hours before the display, and the collapse of a wall and part of a structure at Santa María Canchesdá complicates the task of determining what ignited first. Officials have not detailed how much pyrotechnic material was on hand, or how it came to be positioned where it was.
For residents, the wait for answers plays out alongside the immediate work of caring for the injured and burying the dead. Photographs taken the day after the explosion, on Sunday, showed neighbors standing at the edge of the destroyed area, surveying a stretch of the community reduced to rubble and blackened ground beside the church where the festival had been underway.
Fireworks and Mexico’s Festival Tradition
Pyrotechnic accidents happen often in Mexico, where fireworks are a fixture of street celebrations and religious festivals throughout the calendar. Rockets, ground displays and towering castillos — the elaborate bamboo-and-wire frames loaded with spinning fireworks — are staples of patron saint festivals in towns across the country, set off in the middle of crowds gathered in plazas and churchyards rather than at a distance from spectators.
That proximity has produced repeated tragedies. Nearly four years before the Temascalcingo blast, an explosion of fireworks in a village in Hidalgo, a state in central Mexico, left 17 people hurt.
The State of Mexico, which wraps around Mexico City on three sides, is a populous state and home to numerous communities with long-standing pyrotechnic traditions and workshops. Temascalcingo sits in the state’s northwestern reaches, a rural municipality where the annual festival for Our Lady of Light draws residents from surrounding hamlets into the church’s immediate surroundings.
The Santa María Canchesdá explosion adds to a pattern of fireworks accidents at Mexican religious celebrations, and it has focused attention on how pyrotechnic material is stored and handled at events that pack hundreds of people into narrow streets and churchyards. Any regulatory response, however, will likely wait on the findings of the state investigation.
As of Monday, the toll from the blast stood at 10 dead and 64 injured, with a cause still not established and the Mexico State Attorney General’s Office continuing its inquiry. Two priests were among the wounded, and hospitals in the region took in patients who included children and elderly residents pulled from the debris of a celebration that never reached its finale.