ZAMBOANGA CITY, 4 January 2007 — The death toll in Friday’s tanker truck explosion in the southern Philippines has risen to 50 after rescuers accounted for the mutilated remains of more victims, officials said yesterday.
Maj. Gen. Raymundo Ferrer, commander of the army’s 1st Infantry Division, said rescuers also counted 65 injured, with 40 in critical condition.
“Our soldiers and others were still recovering body parts scattered around the blast site in Lacupayan village,” said Ferrer.
Police earlier said the tanker truck was negotiating a downhill stretch of the highway in Tigbao town in Zamboanga del Sur province on Friday when its brakes failed, causing it to slam into the side of the mountain before overturning and killing its driver. While passersby were extricating the victims from the truck, a powerful explosion demolished the vehicle and blew off the roof of a passing bus, hurling it into the opposite lane, provincial police chief Senior Superintendent Ramon Ochotorena said.
The injured were brought to different hospitals in the province, about 770 kilometers (480 miles) south of Manila, said provincial social welfare officer Conchita San Diego. She said many of the victims were passengers of the bus and residents of nearby communities and passing motorists who stopped or were slowed down by the traffic jam caused by the overturned tanker truck.
The truck’s owner told police the tanker contained liquefied carbon dioxide that was to be delivered to a Coca-Cola plant in Zamboanga City, about 200 kilometers farther southwest, Ochotorena said.
Ochotorena said 24 bodies and the decapitated head of a person were recovered at the scene. Two other people died later Friday in hospitals in the provincial capital of Pagadian, 20 kilometers away.
Chemists from the National Bureau of Investigation are helping investigate the explosion, which was so powerful that the tanker, which had a 2.54-centimeter (1-inch) metal skin, was “blown to smithereens,” he said. The truck’s transmission was found several hundred meters away, he added.
Mark Gleen Tahum, 24, one of the truck’s crew, said he was able to save himself by jumping off the truck before it overturned and helped pull out another crewman.
