One man is dead and at least 380 more are injured after New Year’s fireworks in the Philippines ended in tragedy.
A drunken man foolishly lit a firecracker and hugged it, setting off a blaze that ripped off the man’s jaw and killed him. A separate inferno consumed 1,000 shanties in the slums of Manila, officials said Friday.
The destruction from the dynamite-like firework, morbidly named “Goodbye Philippines,” left thousands of impoverished families homeless — although this sort of incendiary tragedy is not unprecedented for a Filipino New Year’s Eve.
Photos from the gory evening showed people arriving at hospitals with bloody wounds. Some had missing limbs or fingers.
Health Secretary Janette Garin said that there were more than twice as many injuries last year.
She attributed the downswing in destruction both to rain late Thursday night and to a gory government scare campaign to discourage firework use by publicizing photos of fingerless victims of firecracker accidents.
Typically, Filipinos go all out to ring in the New Year, in part because of a Chinese-influenced belief that loud and raucous New Year cheer scares away bad luck.
Some groups go all out for different reasons; Iglesia ni Cristo exploded some 700,000 pyrotechnic devices in an effort to set a Guinness record for largest fireworks display.
Although that display didn’t cause chaos and destruction, in the aftermath of this year’s disaster Garin said that the best solution would be to illegalize all fireworks.
“What’s really better is a total ban on firecrackers,” she said.
With News Wire Services
