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It is 5:30 in the morning on November 19, 1984.
Virginia Martínez Téllez, 13, sleeps with her family in San Juan Ixhuatepec, today commonly known as San Juanico, a northern suburb of Mexico City.
Neither she nor the other nearly 40,000 local residents, who live in houses mostly made of concrete and wood, realize a massive gas leak that will change their lives forever.
The young woman lives approximately one kilometer from a gas storage and distribution plant owned by Pemex, the state oil company.
That is why she is used to seeing the combustion torch, where excess gas is burned, 24 hours a day.
It is part of your daily landscape.
But what you will see when you wake up that morning will be something else.
"It looked like a war zone," he recalls in an interview with the BBC's Witness History.
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What became known as the San Juanico disaster left more than 650 dead and 2,500 injured, in addition to some 25,000 people homeless.
Before the disaster
Virginia lived with her six siblings, her grandmother and her parents.
"It was a town of very working people with limited resources, lower middle class," he says.
He was about to turn 14 at the time of the disaster that would become the deadliest gas explosion in Mexico and the world.
Over the previous 20 years, the suburbs of San Juanico had grown considerably, so that some homes were just 130 meters from the plant.
The complex had six enormous spherical storage tanks and dozens of cylindrical tanks, popularly known as "sausages."
All of that would be shattered that morning.
The explosion
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"It was a very loud explosion. I got out of bed and saw that the curtains were stuck to the ceiling, as if it were Marilyn Monroe's skirt blown up by the wind," Virginia remembers.
"I immediately looked out and everything was orange, with shades of blue 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 it could detonate again," he says.
The gas leak in one of the tanks formed a vapor cloud. The cloud caught fire, causing a flare and an explosion.
The fire spread from a tanker truck that exploded, setting off a chain reaction through the storage facility, whose tanks normally held 80,000 barrels of liquefied gas.
Shortly before dawn, a plume of fire rose more than a mile into the night sky, blanketing this shantytown suburb in a hail of burning debris.
"There was a huge whirlpool in which a multitude of particles were flying. It seemed to me that they were sheets of metal," Virginia recalls.
It was reported that the reddish glow could be seen from the other end of the capital.
Virginia felt how the air was compressed inside her room. "It's like when you go underwater: the deeper you go, the more pressure you feel."
The escape
"Get up, let's go! We have to go! Put on your shoes, the first ones you find!" her mother told Virginia and her siblings that morning.
"My father tried to open the door, but as soon as he touched the metal handle he burned himself. He had to use a rag to protect himself so he could open the door of the house."
When they managed to leave the house they felt a scorching heat. "It was like we were in the tropics."
Many of his neighbors tried to escape barefoot and in their underwear.
The entire 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. His father drove through a haze of smoke, but construction and paving made the roads even more difficult to navigate.
Virginia looked out the window.
"There was a lot of chaos. People running, screaming, climbing the hill like ants. They were heading to the Zacatenco hill to reach the then Federal District. Everything was grayish, very black, as if there was a thick fog. I guess it was the residue of the first explosion," he says.
Then they took the Mexico-Pachuca highway in the direction of Indios Verdes and, approximately one kilometer from San Juanico, the second explosion occurred.
"I heard the roar. I looked back and saw a huge, huge column of fire. I was very afraid that San Juanico no longer existed."
The inferno quickly spread through the neighborhood.
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. In turn, we tried to calm and control the little 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 soon as possible."
More explosions, known as Bleve (explosions of expanding vapors from boiling liquids), occurred as other storage tanks ruptured.
As Virginia and her family fled east of Mexico City, thousands of emergency workers headed toward the epicenter of the disaster.
Throughout the day, 3,000 police, supported by soldiers and Red Cross volunteers, rescued more and more victims from the ruins. The city's medical resources were overwhelmed.
The family arrived safely at relatives' home and watched the television news in horror as the extent of the devastation was revealed.
"There were lost children, people separated from their families and others who had not managed to escape and had remained hugging each other," says Virginia.
His family wanted to return home, but it wasn't that simple.
a ghost town
"It was a cordoned-off ghost town. The Mexican army wouldn't let us enter. My father, along with some nephews, managed to get in first. Later I learned that they had bribed some guards. So they were able to access it on foot to feed the pets that had been left in the house," he remembers.
They were the first to see all the desolation that was there.
Virginia did not return until December. His childhood home had become a nightmare.
Two mass graves were dug to bury hundreds of victims.
"It was very sad. Something inside me broke. I realized the magnitude of the disaster. It looked 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 was also visible evidence of the extreme heat and force of the successive explosions that devastated the district. One of the storage tanks was thrown four blocks away.
"I saw destroyed houses along the Remedios River, houses 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 on the houses," he says.
Pemex assumed responsibility for the incident and agreed to compensate the victims.
Health and safety experts concluded that the tragedy was the result of a combination of technical failures, safety deficiencies and poor urban planning.
For Virginia, the San Juanico explosion continues to affect her life more than 40 years later:
"I am hypersensitive to the smell of gas. I get very upset and put on high alert when something similar happens," he says.
"It affects me deeply. In fact, I developed a kind of anxiety; what today we would call post-traumatic stress disorder."
That, unfortunately, was not the only explosion linked to the Mexican state oil company.
Similar industrial accidents have occurred in other locations in the country, such as Guadalajara, Reynosa, San Martín Texmelucan, Coatzacoalcos and Tlahuelilpan.
But San Juanico remains the deadliest.
*With information from the BBC's Witness History podcast.
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