in five months; but the blasts have been widely scattered around the country and do not appear to involve sabotage.
The latest explosion occurred last Thursday on the deck of an oil pipe storehouse in Khorramshahr, an announcement said. It said one man was killed and two others injured. It blamed the blast on some ammunition that had been stored at the site during the 1980-88 war and never removed.
The last previous explosion was August 6 near Mashhad as a workman trying to lay a new gas pipeline smashed into an existing gas pipeline with his bulldozer and set off an immense blast with a ball of fire that engulfed an area 600 meters or more than a third of a mile across.
There have been conflicting reports on deaths and injuries, but at least four workmen died. Some reports said the death toll might reach 10 because of serious injuries to others. Twelve had been killed in the four previous explosions of recent months.
The six explosions in five months have been widely scattered physically and have involved gas, oil and petrochemicals. There has been some speculation of sabotage by foreign powers because all six have been near Iran’s borders. But the government has not alleged any sabotage. The map below shows the six locales.
Two days before the Mashhad pipeline explosion, five men were killed when a blast erupted from a gas leak while workmen were welding an ethane pipeline at the Pardis petrochemical plant in Assaluyeh port on the Persian Gulf coast. The plant had been inaugurated days earlier by President Ahmadi-nejad.
One day before that explosion, the governor of Talesh in Gilan province on the Caspian coast, Khalid Behruzifar, told the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) a gas pipeline explosion there had caused some minor damage to nearby farms, but there were no casualties. Thirty-two meters of the main pipeline, which carries gas to the western provinces, were destroyed.
Two weeks before that, four people were killed in an explosion and fire on Kharg Island, home to Iran’s largest oil export terminal in the Persian Gulf. Provincial officials said the explosion was caused by high pressure in the boiler of a petrochemical factory.
Before that, Iranian fire-fighters needed nearly 40 days to extinguish a blowout and fire at an oil well in the western province of Kermanshah. The explosion May 29 killed three workers, injured a dozen more, and sent balls of flame into the air. At its worst, the fire was consuming 8,000 barrels of oil a day.