Firefighters, Carabineros and personnel from the Emergency Medical Assistance Service (Samu) work in the Cerro 18 sector in the Lo Barnechea commune, Santiago de Chile Metropolitan Region, due to a strong explosion reported by neighbors on the morning of this Thursday.
According to information provided by the police, It was an incident due to gas emanation, which has left three homes affected, nine people injured -among them a minor and one in serious condition at the El Salvador Hospital- and a person trapped in the rubble of the place, who has already been rescued.
Firefighters work at the scene and specialized personnel from the Carabineros have come to clear the sector and allow work. In this sense, traffic was restricted on Los Quincheris street between El León and the Cerro 18 elevator sector.
“We are going to clear the entire sector of the neighbors so that firefighters can review the entire sector to rule out that there may be gas emanation in some other home,” said Colonel Alison Larrañaga.
Neighbors spoke to the media. The father of the injured minor mentioned: “I heard an explosion and I turned around to protect my wife and my son by my side. But it was in a second, I thought that a plane had fallen on top of the houses and I turned on the phone and that’s it everything was destroyed (…) I thought I had died immediately”. His 17-year-old son was transferred to the Guillermo Javier Cornejo polyclinic.
Another grieving neighbor recounted that “I was with my husband when we felt this and we didn’t know (…) and when we heard the noise we covered ourselves, we didn’t know we were terrified.”
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