Credit, AP
It was 5:30 am on November 19, 1984. 13-year-old Virginia Martínez Téllez was sleeping next to her family in San Juan Ixhuatepec, now popularly known as San Juanico, a suburb north of Mexico City.
Neither she nor the approximately 40,000 other inhabitants of the area, who live in houses built mostly of concrete and wood, noticed a huge gas leak that would change their lives forever.
The young woman lived approximately one kilometer from a gas storage and distribution facility belonging to Pemex, Mexico's state oil company.
Therefore, I was used to seeing the flame of the burning torch, where excess gas is incinerated, lit 24 hours a day. It was part of the everyday landscape. But what I would see when I woke up that morning would be something completely different.
"It looked like a war zone," she recalls, in an interview with the BBC's Witness History program.
The episode, which became known as the San Juanico disaster, left more than 650 dead and 2,500 injured, in addition to around 25,000 people homeless.
Before the disaster
Virginia lived with her six siblings, grandmother and parents. “It was a community of very hard-working people with limited resources, lower middle class,” she says.
She was about to turn 14 when the disaster occurred, which would become the deadliest gas explosion in Mexico and the world.
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Over the previous two decades, San Juanico's neighborhoods had grown considerably, so that some homes were only 400 feet from the facility.
The complex had six huge spherical storage tanks and dozens of cylindrical reservoirs, popularly known as "sausages".
All of this would be reduced to pieces that morning.
The explosion
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"It was a very strong explosion. I got out of bed and saw that the curtains were stuck to the ceiling, as if they were Marilyn Monroe's skirt lifted by the wind", recalls Virginia.
"I immediately looked outside and everything was orange, with bluish tones and shapes that looked like tongues of fire. I remember the light, the noise, the chaos. An overwhelming heat and the terror of thinking that, at any moment, everything could explode again", he reports.
The gas leak in one of the reservoirs formed a vapor cloud. The cloud caught fire, causing a flame and an explosion.
The fire spread from a tanker truck that exploded, setting off a chain reaction at the storage facilities, whose reservoirs normally held 80,000 barrels of liquefied gas.
Just before dawn, a column of fire rose more than a mile into the night sky, covering this suburb of precarious housing in a rain of burning debris.
"There was a huge whirlpool, in which countless particles were flying. They looked like sheets of metal", recalls Virginia.
According to reports, the reddish flash could be seen from the other end of the capital.
Virginia felt the air compress inside her room. "It's like when you dive underwater: the deeper you go, the greater the pressure you feel."
The leak
"Get up, come on! We have to go! Put on your shoes, the first ones you find!", Virginia's mother said to her children that morning.
"My father tried to open the door, but as soon as he touched the metal handle, he burned his hand. He had to use a cloth to protect himself and be able to open the door."
When they managed to get out, they felt scorching heat. Many neighbors tried to escape barefoot and in their underwear. The whole family ran towards what they hoped would be their salvation from the fire and thermal radiation: their old car, which needed to be pushed to start.
Everyone squeezed inside the vehicle. The father drove through a haze of smoke, but construction and paving work made the roads even more difficult to cross.
Virginia looked out the window. "There was immense chaos. People running, screaming, climbing the hill like ants. They were heading towards Zacatenco Hill to get to the then Federal District. Everything was grayish, very dark, as if there was a thick fog. I suppose it was the residue from the first explosion", she recalls.
They then took the Mexico-Pachuca highway towards Indios Verdes and, approximately one kilometer from San Juanico, the second explosion occurred.
"I heard the bang. I looked back and saw a huge, huge column of fire. I was very scared that San Juanico was no more."
The fire remained out of control for seven hours.
"I was the third of seven siblings. I had two older sisters. They tried to comfort us and hug us. We, in turn, tried to reassure and control the younger ones", says Virginia.
"My parents, of course, were also terrified, but my father remained calm to ensure our safety and get us out of there as quickly as possible."
New explosions occurred, known as BLEVE (explosions resulting from the expansion of vapors due to the boiling of liquids), as other storage tanks ruptured.
As Virginia and her family fled towards the east of Mexico City, thousands of emergency professionals headed towards the epicenter of the disaster.
Throughout the day, three thousand police officers, with the support of Red Cross soldiers and volunteers, rescued an increasing number of victims amidst the rubble. The city's medical services were overwhelmed.
The family arrived safely at their relatives' home and watched the news on television in horror as the extent of the devastation was revealed.
"There were lost children, people separated from their families and others who were unable to escape and remained hugging each other", says Virginia.
His family wanted to return home, but it wasn't that simple.
A ghost town
"It was a ghost town, isolated by security cordons. The Mexican Army wouldn't let us in. My father, accompanied by some nephews, managed to get in first. Later I found out that they had bribed some guards. So, they managed to get in on foot to feed the pets that had stayed at home", he recalls.
They were the first to see all the desolation there.
Virginia only returned in December. His childhood home had turned into a nightmare scenario. Two mass graves were opened to bury hundreds of victims.
"It was very sad. Something inside me broke. I understood the scale of the disaster. It felt like a war zone. There was a smell that, to this day, I can't describe. It was something completely different. My parents said it smelled like burning flesh."
There were also visible signs of the extreme heat and force of the successive explosions that devastated the neighborhood. One of the storage tanks was thrown four blocks away.
“I saw destroyed houses along the Rio de los Remedios, homes that belonged to schoolmates,” he says. "I also looked up the hill and saw where the shells had landed. Fragments of the storage spheres or those long containers we called 'sausages' had fallen onto the houses."
Pemex took responsibility for the disaster and agreed to compensate the victims.
Health and safety experts concluded that the tragedy was the result of a combination of technical failures, deficiencies in safety systems and inadequate urban planning.
For Virginia, the San Juanico explosion continues to affect her life more than 40 years later:
"I'm extremely sensitive to the smell of gas. I get very agitated and on high alert when something like that happens," he says. "It affects me deeply. I actually developed a kind of anxiety, what today we would call post-traumatic stress disorder."
Unfortunately, that was not the only explosion involving the Mexican state oil company.
Similar industrial accidents occurred in other locations across the country, such as Guadalajara, Reynosa, San Martín Texmelucan, Coatzacoalcos and Tlahuelilpan.
But the San Juanico tragedy remains the deadliest.
*With information from the BBC Witness History podcast
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