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A series of explosions ripped through a Mexican fireworks market on Thursday, sending a huge column of smoke into the air and scaring residents but a large-scale tragedy was avoided.
The blasts, lasting for two hours, reduced the market in the town of Tultepec, west of the capital, to a charred ruin.
"It just got bigger and bigger, fireworks, fireworks," sobbed a man on the scene, interviewed on the radio while searching for two missing brothers.
Civil protection workers said around 100 people were affected by the blasts, either slightly injured or in a state of shock.
Hospital officials could not confirm reports that several people had died in the explosions, which came as Mexicans stocked up on fireworks for independence day celebrations on Thursday night.
Stall holders and shoppers at the market managed to escape through well signaled exits when the first blasts hit, state civil protection head Roberto Vazquez told Reuters.
Thick white smoke billowed a kilometer (0.6 miles) into the sky over the town, one of the main centers of firework production in Mexico.
Television footage from a helicopter showed a charred, smoldering area the size of a football pitch where emergency workers fought sporadic fires.
People scrambled to move wreckage amid hundreds of stalls burned to the ground and the charred wrecks of cars.
A radio reporter described people fleeing the scene with burns. Exploding fireworks could be heard in the background.
The blasts came celebrations began for the September 15 independence day, when Mexicans fire often poorly-made fireworks into the air.
Village fiestas and national holidays in Mexico rarely go by without the sound of rockets and bangers going off.
Fireworks are sold by the tens of thousands in mid-September, many in informal markets not controlled by authorities.
Twenty-eight people died after a blast at a street market selling fireworks in the coastal city of Veracruz on New Year's Eve, 2002.
(Source: Reuters)
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