I escaped Mexico's deadly gas explosion
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 2026
⏱️ 11 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Just before dawn, on 19 November 1984, an explosion at a gas plant in San Juanico, Mexico killed hundreds of people, injured thousands and destroyed buildings.
Virginia MartĂnez Tellez was a young teenager at the time and talks to Jen Dale about how she and her family escaped the intense heat and fire of what's considered one of the world's deadliest industrial gas accidents.
This programme contains distressing content.
Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by and curious about the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there.
For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more.
Recent episodes explore everything from how the Excel spreadsheet was developed, the creation of cartoon rabbit Miffy and how the sound barrier was broken.
We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: the moment Reagan and Gorbachev met in Geneva, Haitian singer Emerante de Pradines’ life and Omar Sharif’s legendary movie entrance in Lawrence of Arabia.
You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, like the invention of a stent which has saved lives around the world; the birth of the G7; and the meeting of Maldives’ ministers underwater. We cover everything from World War Two and Cold War stories to Black History Month and our journeys into space.
(Photo: The San Juanico explosion. Credit: GDA/Associated Press)
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. |
| 0:07.2 | Things just swirling around my head. |
| 0:09.6 | Am I really the product of this? |
| 0:12.1 | Astonishing secrets uncovered by at-home DNA tests. |
| 0:17.0 | Little did I know what more was to come. |
| 0:19.5 | I'm Jenny Clemen, and in the new series of The Gift, we'll hear more stories emerging out of the ever-expanding global DNA database. They did know that I was different. You had kids together. Yeah. Then you met. Then we met. The Gift. Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:43.7 | Hello and welcome to witness history. |
| 0:46.6 | I'm Gendale, and this is the podcast that looks back at a key moment in history that's helped to shape our world. |
| 0:53.4 | Episodes come out every weekday and are just |
| 0:55.6 | nine minutes long. Make sure you never miss an episode by hitting subscribe and turning on your |
| 1:01.5 | push notifications. I'm taking you back to the 1980s, to Mexico's capital for what's widely |
| 1:09.0 | considered one of the world's deadliest industrial gas accidents. |
| 1:13.8 | And just to warn you, it contains distressing details. |
| 1:21.0 | The light, the noise, chaos, the overwhelming heat, the terror that at any moment it would explode even more. |
| 1:29.4 | In Mexico City, rescue workers are still pulling victims out of the debris of the thousands of homes and factories devastated by last night's gas explosion. |
| 1:40.8 | It's 1984 and 13-year-old Virginia Martinez-Tayez lives in San Juan Ikshatepec, now commonly known as San Juanico, a northern suburb of Mexico City. |
| 1:54.0 | It's densely populated with around 40,000 people in the area, living in a mixture of concrete and wooden one-story houses. |
| 2:03.9 | In the town, mostly very hardworking people, with not a lot of resources from the lower |
| 2:10.1 | middle class. With regard to my family, we were seven brothers and sisters, my paternal |
| 2:16.1 | grandmother and my dad and mom. |
| 2:18.9 | Virginia and her family live around a kilometer away from a gas storage and distribution |
| 2:24.1 | depot owned by Pemex, the state oil company. The teenagers used to seeing the flare stack, |
... |
Transcript will be available on the free plan in 21 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.