An explosion attributed to a gas leak collapsed a four-story residential block in Messina's Pistunina district on Thursday, critically injuring five people and leaving six missing, Sky TG24 reported. [1]

The building is a ruin of exposed rooms; the rescue is the story's present tense. Six missing is a rescue-stage figure — not a toll — and the gas attribution, however plausible the smell of it, remains pending investigation. [1]

Italy's aging housing stock makes the familiar sermon easy to preach, and the usual questions — when the building's gas infrastructure was last inspected, by whom, under which municipal ledger — are the correct ones. They are also, as of Thursday, unanswered ones. No inspection record has been produced, and no liability file exists in public. The neglect frame generalizes beautifully and proves nothing about Pistunina.

What the evening holds is narrower than the sermon: a collapsed block, five people critically hurt, six unaccounted for, and crews working the rubble under floodlights. Whether the gas attribution survives the investigation, and whether the missing are recovered, will decide what kind of story this becomes — a tragedy of chance or an entry in an enforcement ledger somebody will finally have to open.

-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London