At least one person has died, two continue to be missing, and another 30 have been injured after a powerful explosion triggered by a gas leak this Friday in the municipality of Lanús, near Buenos Aires, according to what local authorities have confirmed.
The Government of Lanús has indicated in an initial assessment that a single fatal victim was located at the site of the incident and that the 30 injured people have been transferred to different hospitals in the area, including seven in a state of “seriousness” and 13 who remain under observation “out of danger”.
The emergency services deployed to the scene continue at this hour with search and rescue tasks, since “the whereabouts of two people is still unknown”, according to a statement released on social networks by the municipal authorities.
The blast occurred shortly before 10:52 a.m., local time, at the intersection of two streets where “working” Exgadet was present, a subcontracted company by Metrogas— the main private distributor of natural gas in the country— which was carrying out “network renewal” work. “In one of the operations with a tunneling machine, they damaged the distribution network pipe,” the authorities explained in their report.
In that same note, the Government of Lanús criticized the company’s personnel for having “opted” to report the pipe break, recorded at 9:44 a.m., local time, only to MetroGAS’s internal service and not to the municipality’s emergency systems.
As the local Executive emphasizes, this decision prevented the evacuation protocol in the affected area from being activated immediately, considering that the damage to the conduit occurred “more than an hour before the explosion”. “A very valuable amount of time has been lost,” the municipal government lamented.
The Argentine Prosecutor’s Office has ordered the detention of two Metrogas executives, while the company has publicly defended that “no safety protocols were breached”.