Ammunition Depot Blast Kills 10 in Albania
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Ten people were confirmed killed and nearly 300 injured in a huge explosion at an Albanian munitions depot on the outskirts of Tirana, authorities said. But more casualties were likely to be found by rescuers combing the area devastated by the blast Saturday that virtually flattened a town outside the capital, Tirana.
All ten victims have been identified, and 16 of the worst-injured people had been airlifted to hospitals in Italy and Greece. - Officially, there are still ten persons who were working at the site who are unaccounted for ... along with 70 others whom we are looking for, Prime Minister Sali Berisha told a press conference earlier Sunday. Some reports said that as many as 121 workers were at the depot, where thousands of tons of decades-old, Soviet and Chinese-made ordnance was being defused when disaster struck, most likely because of human error. Some 4.000 people from the area have been evacuated as smaller detonations continued a full day after the initial blast, preventing rescuers from penetrating the compound tunnels, which comprised four munitions storage facilities, where people may still be trapped. Ordnance strewn across a 5-kilometre radius was hampering the rescue effort. Gerdec, 14 kilometres from Tirana, was effectively flattened by the blast – 2.000 homes within a four-kilometer radius had been damaged, 318 of them were destroyed, more than 200 others were partly destroyed and 185 were heavily damaged. Similar munitions depots, reportedly with up to 100,000 tons of ordnance, are scattered around Albania. |
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