On the 13th of May, 2000, residents in the Dutch city of Enschede noticed smoke in the
sky. A small industrial complex in the northern part of the city was on fire.
Fire engines made their way towards the blaze while people watched from a safe distance, fully
expecting to see it brought under control within a few hours. Instead, at around 3:30pm, a massive
explosion shook the entire city, obliterating a whole neighborhood in a matter of moments.
SE Fireworks was founded in 1977. At that time it was a relatively small company which manufactured
its own fireworks for sale to the public. The site was well managed and the workers extremely safety
conscious - something which resulted in there being no major incidents at all for many years.
This excellent safety record, coupled with a range of high quality products, allowed SE Fireworks
to grow swiftly, and it was soon providing pyrotechnics for annual festivals throughout the
Netherlands, as well as for high profile concerts by artists including Michael Jackson and Bon Jovi.
Of course, this success meant that their business model had to change. It was no longer practical
to make their fireworks themselves; instead they started importing them from abroad.
The site became primarily a fireworks storage depot, rather than a fireworks factory, although
some work was still done on site to customize fireworks to meet the particular needs of clients.
This shift in focus allowed SE Fireworks to take on more clients and expand their business still
further, to the point that capacity became a bit of a problem. The site Enschede consisted
of a few workshops and numerous concrete bunkers where fireworks could be stored.
In 1977 there was capacity enough for 18,000 kilograms (or 18 tonnes) of fireworks, but by the
late 1990s SE Fireworks were packing 10 times that amount of explosive material into the same space.
To alleviate the storage problem a few new bunkers were installed, and SE Fireworks was
granted permission to bring in some shipping containers. These were a temporary solution,
of course: they'd eventually have to move to a bigger site. But, for the time being, the
shipping containers provided ample space for their excess stock - especially since, in addition to
the containers they'd been granted permission for, SE Fireworks quietly added several extra ones too.
The end result was a site that was packed with explosives - way more than it had been designed
for, and way more than anyone outside of SE Fireworks would ever reasonably suspect. To make
matters worse, while SE Fireworks had been growing as a company, Enschede had been growing as a city.
The SE Fireworks site had, when first built, been surrounded by nothing but trees and fields.
Gradually, over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, this empty space was filled with new housing,
until SE Fireworks found itself surrounded by residential neighborhoods. Some houses
stood directly adjacent to the depot. Few people fully appreciated the danger inherent in this.
When one resident complained, the city council of Enschede fobbed them off, explaining that the land
on which SE Fireworks was built was clearly zoned for industrial use. As far as they were concerned
the fact that the zoning was technically correct meant that there was no issue to be addressed.
The definitive cause of the fire has never been determined,
but it may have been down to a short circuit or electrical fault in a piece of equipment
in workshop C2. It was a Saturday and according to normal rules of operation this workshop
should have been clean and empty. It wasn't. In fact, it was packed with hundreds of fireworks,
some of them stored in open containers or lying out on workbenches. The fire ignited these
fireworks, causing them to shoot off from the burning building and set fire to other structures
on the site. By the time the fire service arrived on scene the blaze was already well established.
Noting that there were explosives on site, the fire service set up a cordon... but it was a
cordon based on an incorrect assessment of how much explosive material was present. They had no
idea to what an extensive degree SE Fireworks had been overfilling their available storage space.
By 3:30pm the fire had spread to and penetrated the bunkers where the majority of the fireworks
were stored. One bunker detonated, setting off a chain reaction that seconds later caused the
others to explode too. Flames and shock waves rippled through the surrounding neighborhood.
Onlookers were thrown to the ground, glass shattered, buildings collapsed,
and several of the firefighters on scene were killed almost instantly.
Following the explosion, more resources were brought in to fight the flames
including several engines from Germany who crossed the border to help.
By the end of the day the fire was under control, but it was too late for many of those affected.
22 people were killed in the explosion, including four firefighters. Nearly 1,000 people sustained
injuries requiring treatment, and the neighborhood which surrounded the site was almost completely
destroyed. Buildings that weren't flattened were damaged to the point of structural instability
and had to be demolished, leaving thousands of people without homes.
An investigation was undertaken, but couldn't determine the initial cause of the fire
as the site of the disaster was comprehensively destroyed. It was revealed, though, that SE
Fireworks had violated numerous safety rules: the doors of shipping containers had been left open,
unapproved fireworks had been stored on site, no separation distance had been maintained between
containers, and those extra shipping containers had been added to the site without permission.
And yet, despite all of this, the site had passed a safety audit just a few weeks before
the disaster. How could this be possible? In the end it was concluded that local authorities,
national authorities, and the operators of SE Fireworks were all to share some of the blame.
On a national level departments which might have intervened before an explosion could take
place had been stripped back, underfunded, or reorganized to the point that nobody was
entirely sure whose responsibility it was to deal with issues like unsafe industrial installations.
Was it down to the Environmental Investigation Bureau or the Dutch Ministry of Housing? Or
was it, perhaps, the purview of the Hazardous Materials Inspection Agency...
just one of several branches of government that had been eliminated in the 1990s.
Local authorities, at the same time, were criticized for their complacency.
Inspections had been cursory, with inspectors routinely not issuing fines even when they did
see a breach of protocol. It was perhaps a case of reduced hazard awareness. SE Fireworks had never
seen a serious incident until the explosion. After two whole decades of operating safely
it might have seemed to inspectors to be not that important to stick rigidly to every single rule.
Exceptions could be made for a business which had proven itself with such a good safety record.
Finally, the operators of SE Fireworks were guilty of the same complacency.
The company had started out with an acute awareness of the need to operate safely,
but time had passed. The business had grown. No serious accidents had taken place, and
little by little it had started to seem less and less important to adhere as closely to the rules
as they used to. If they had been at all concerned about how close they were to a residential area,
that concern had been tempered by the perception that an accident was vanishingly unlikely. All
had been well for more than two decades, so why should they worry about something going wrong now?
In the end, though there was much criticism of all parties involved,
few people faced any real consequences. Two of the owners of SE Fireworks were given small fines and
short prison sentences - so short, in fact, that they were easily covered by
the time that they had already spent in custody awaiting trial. Meanwhile the Dutch government
undertook a huge program of reform focused on the handling of fireworks.
A national catalogue of every warehouse storing fireworks was created, and along with several
other measures clearly defined safety distances were set. Any installation holding fireworks for
sale to the public would need to be 30 meters (or 98 feet) away from any other building,
and any installation storing fireworks for sale to business customers would need to be isolated
by 800 meters (or 2,600 feet) from any other significant structure. This requirement meant that
more than half of fireworks storage facilities in the Netherlands were closed or moved, a massive
undertaking that would never have happened were it not for the explosion which devastated
Enschede. Though it came at a terrible cost, tens of thousands of people in the Netherlands
now live and work in places that are no longer at risk of being destroyed in a similar explosion.