ROME: A huge explosion at a petrol station in a Rome suburb on Friday left 45 people hurt, two of them seriously, and rattled windows across the Italian capital.

The blast around 8.20am (0620 GMT) was preceded by a fire caused by a gas leak during refuelling, according to Rome Mayor Roberto Gualtieri.

The mayor visited the charred and smoking remains of the petrol and liquefied natural gas (LNG) station and an adjacent sports centre in the Prenestino neighbourhood of eastern Rome.

The explosion sent a fireball and thick black smoke into the air, and was heard on the other side of Rome, shaking windows and causing some residents to worry that a bomb had gone off.

“The explosion was really powerful. I felt my skin burning,” Michele Secu, a 23-year-old who worked at the now-destroyed sports centre, said.

“I was 15 metres from the petrol station... it exploded in front of me. I don’t know how I managed to run, to escape,” he said.

Before the explosion, emergency services were called to investigate the gas leak and had evacuated the immediate area, including a children’s summer camp.

Twenty-one of the 45 injured were from the emergency services, including 12 policemen.

Disaster averted

Fabio Balzani, head of the sports centre, said if the fire had occurred just a bit later it could have been disastrous.

Some 60 children had been expected at the summer camp and around 120 people booked to use the swimming pool, as relief from a heatwave that has baked the city for the past week.

“It would have been a massacre, a catastrophe,” Balzani said.

Published in Dawn, July 5th, 2025