Ireland | At least 10 dead in gas station explosion

(Creeslough) Ten people, including two teenagers and a young girl, have been killed in a petrol station explosion in a village in north-west Ireland, Irish police said on Saturday.

The blast happened shortly Friday around 3:20 p.m. (10:20 a.m. ET) in the village of Creeslough. “She had ten victims,” a police official told a press conference. They are four men, three women, two teenagers (a boy and a girl) and a girl, of primary school age, he explained.

“We do not expect there to be other victims,” ​​added the official. There is no information on missing persons.

“The information we have at present points to a tragic accident,” he said again, seeming to rule out a voluntary act. But the police keep an “open mind”.

An aerial photograph taken after the blast shows the destroyed gas station building. Two two-storey residential buildings behind it collapsed.

Neighborhood resident Kieran Gallagher, whose house is about 150 meters from the scene, said the detonation made him think of a “bomb”: “I was at home when I heard an explosion. […] It was like a bomb,” he told the BBC.

The community has been hit by “a tsunami of grief”, said Saturday morning, during a mass in the village church, the priest John Joe Duffy.

The emergency services, accompanied by sniffer dogs to find victims, worked throughout the night. The rubble continued to be picked up on Saturday morning.

Police, fire, ambulance services and the Irish Coast Guard were on the scene. They were supported by the Northern Ireland Air Ambulance Service as well as a team of specialists from the British province on Saturday.

Letterkenny University Hospital, 15 miles from the service station, was placed on an emergency and said in a statement it was caring for “multiple injuries”.

Damage and debris

In a statement, Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin said his “thoughts and prayers (are) today with those who lost their lives and those who were injured in this devastating explosion”.

Micheal Martin announced that he was going to go there. “It’s such a small village that almost everyone knows someone who has lost their life,” he told reporters on Saturday morning. “It’s a very dark day for Donegal (the county where Creeslough is located, editor’s note) and for Ireland”.

Agriculture Minister Charlie McConalogue, who is an elected member of the Irish parliament from the blast-hit region, compared the scenes of devastation to those of the Northern Irish conflict in the second half of the 20th century.

“The scenes of the event are reminiscent of images of the ‘Troubles’ years ago, in terms of the damage and debris.”

For three decades, the conflict in Northern Ireland opposed nationalists, mainly Catholics, in favor of the reunification of the island of Ireland, and loyalists, mainly Protestants, attached to maintaining the province under the British crown. This conflict caused around 3,500 deaths.

The village of Creelough, which is about fifty kilometers from the border with Northern Ireland, has about 400 inhabitants.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and friends of those who died, those who were injured and the entire community of Creeslough,” tweeted Applegreen, which owns the stricken gas station. the blast.