Three seriously injured were flown to Vienna and Graz for further treatment.
Two people died in two explosions at a liquid gas filling station in Crevedia, in southern Romania, not far from Bucharest. According to authorities on Sunday, another 56 people were injured in the incident that took place on Saturday night. Romania asked for help to treat the injured with severe burns, three of the victims were on their way to Austria.
A Romanian Air Force aircraft designed to transport patients took off from Bucharest’s Otopeni Airport at 4 pm EEST on Sunday. According to Romania’s head of civil protection, Raed Arafat, further treatment is planned in Vienna and Graz.
According to the information, emergency services rushed to the gas station to extinguish the fire from the first explosion. A second explosion then occurred, injuring 39 firefighters. Two policemen and two gendarmes were also injured. People within a radius of 700 meters had to be evacuated.
Worse prevented by robot extinction
According to Arafat, head of civil protection, the number of injured would have been even higher if the Bucharest firefighters had not used firefighting robots in the extremely difficult extinguishing operation due to the presence of several LPG tankers on site. Firefighters and police were hit by the pressure wave from the second explosion, even though they were more than 100 meters away.
According to authorities, the dead are a couple. The man suffered a heart attack and the woman died from severe burns. According to authorities, two injured firefighters and two injured civilians have been transferred abroad for treatment, with more to follow. According to the Romanian Defense Ministry, the four wounded were taken to Italy and Belgium.
Romania has asked for help to treat 18 people with severe burns through the EU’s civil protection mechanism, EU Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Protection Janez Lenarcic said on the online service X (formerly Twitter). According to him, Germany, Austria and Norway offered support.
“The fire started when gas was being transferred from one tanker truck to another,” Attorney General Alex Florenta told a news conference on Sunday. A fire started under one of the tankers. A cigarette may have been “carelessly thrown away” there, Florenta added.
According to the authorities, the gas station was not in operation and did not have an operating license. Romanian President Klaus Johannis described the incident on Facebook as a “tragedy”.
Inadequate security standards controls
In Romania, a member country of the EU, there are repeated criticisms of insufficient official control of safety standards. In 2015, a fire broke out in a Bucharest nightclub after fireworks were set off. At that time, 64 people died.
Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu (post-communist/PSD) announced late Saturday night that Romania had activated the EU civil protection mechanism for about a dozen people who were seriously burned. In addition to Italy and Belgium, where the first victims of the fire were transported on Sunday night, Austria, Germany, Norway and Bulgaria also offered help. Countless Bucharest residents rushed on Sunday morning to respond to an emergency hospitals’ call to donate blood.
The Attorney General’s Office immediately intervened due to the fire disaster and is currently investigating at full speed. According to the first investigations, the LPG filling station operated by the son of a local PSD politician had been closed since 2020, but the owner seems to have used it as a kind of parking lot for LPG tank trucks. As the Romanian media reported on Sunday, citing residents of Crevedia, two employees at the gas station allegedly tampered with one of the LPG tank trucks shortly before the first explosion. (APA/DPA)