Dutch Fireworks Explosions Rip Apart Hope for Future

His face is a patchwork of gauze-covered gashes. His wrist is sprained and his back is bruised and burned from shielding his mother from falling bricks and fireballs. But Ibrahim Joughlaf knows those wounds will heal.

What may be irrevocably broken is the 26-year-old baker’s conviction that even the son of impoverished Moroccan immigrants can find a place in prosperous Europe, that even for the little guy justice triumphs.

And for the Balkan and African refugees who were living here illegally, last week’s explosions may have blown away all that stood between a chance at a dignified life and deportation.

The afternoon of pyrotechnic horror that followed a pair of explosions at the S.E. Fireworks factory here May 13 consumed Joughlaf’s car, all his belongings and $3,200 in savings he had just taken out of the bank to furnish his tiny apartment near his parents’ house.

The first blast was terrifying enough to send Joughlaf and his mother, Fatima, fleeing the family home across the street from the doomed plant in time to escape the cataclysmic successor that reduced their neighborhood to rubble.

“I didn’t think about grabbing the money, just about getting out of there and keeping the stones and fire from hitting my mother,” recalls the battered young man. Now he can’t help thinking about his uninsured losses, the time he will be out of work and the burden of helping his destitute parents.

All of Enschede’s 150,000 residents have been touched by the blasts, one of the Netherlands’ worst disasters since World War II. Because few even knew that a fireworks factory and its cache of explosives were in the heart of the city, fear and anger have consumed even those spared by the fiery horror.

Eighteen people, including four firefighters, are confirmed dead, untold others are still missing, and nearly 1,000 suffered injuries ranging from minor burns to amputations.

Flags have flown at half-staff throughout the week, and mounds of cellophane-wrapped flowers have filled a park on the edge of the disaster area as crowds have held a round-the-clock vigil for the victims.

The city is dusted with deadly asbestos from shattered buildings, and residents are confronted by the chilling sight of bulldozers spreading truckloads of ruins over an empty field near the blast site so that workers, masked against the asbestos and smell of decomposition, can retrieve the body parts.

Most of the Dutch inhabitants of the stately homes on the periphery of the blast site will likely be made whole again, with homeowners insurance covering repair or reconstruction of their houses and reimbursement for incinerated possessions.

But for those like Joughlaf or the welfare-dependent or illegal immigrants who shared his family’s neighborhood of tidy brick row houses, the accident was a disaster of more enduring proportions.

It was a kick in the teeth for those who had thought that they were within reach of equality and expectations of a good life, a blow perhaps less painful for the body than for the spirit.

“I feel like I have to start my whole life over again, like I’m a newborn baby,” says Joughlaf’s 60-year-old father, Ali. He is scabbed and bruised from being buried by a brick wall after the second blast as he ran home from a nearby cafe.

“I don’t have the will to start again from scratch,” he adds wearily, sipping coffee brought, along with other provisions, to the family’s temporary shelter by a sympathetic stranger. “I would go back to Morocco in a minute, but my wife won’t leave because the children are here.”

Now housed in an unfinished apartment far south of their old neighborhood near Enschede’s bustling center as they await word on what compensation might come from their minimal insurance, the elder Joughlafs understand that they will be stuck in the apartment for years. They had been only renters, and as jobless welfare recipients they can hardly compete with the hundreds of other displaced families for something better.

Even a week after the blast, the full extent of the human and material damage is a mystery. More than 2,500 residents fled or were evacuated during the first hours, but neither emergency relief workers nor city officials can say how many remain homeless. Cordons have come down around homes still reasonably inhabitable, and hundreds of people have delved into the work of re-hanging torn-off doors and replacing shattered windows.

The official death toll hovered all week around the 20 that had been predicted within the first few hours after the disaster, but officials stubbornly refused to discuss the possibility that the wildly fluctuating numbers of missing were victims whose remains were too maimed to permit identification.

Mayor Jan Mans deemed as “absolute nonsense” German media reports and rampant rumors that at least 70 corpses had been amassed at a makeshift morgue at the nearby Twente military airport.

Authorities also have declined to discuss allegations that official corruption had allowed the explosives to be stored in a housing area, or suggestions of arson, referring those issues to a special investigative commission that is expected to take months to reach any conclusions.

On Friday, Dutch police arrested one of the owners of the fireworks factory, and on Saturday, his co-owner--whose lawyer said he had been in a state of shock--turned himself in. Prosecutors had issued arrest warrants for the two, but police have said the company had all the required licenses to conduct its hazardous business.

The confusion over casualties and varying official versions of the tragedy evoked memories of the country’s worst postwar disaster--the 1992 crash of an Israeli El Al cargo plane into an immigrant neighborhood near Amsterdam that killed 47, according to the official tally. Local residents insisted that dozens of illegal immigrants had died in that inferno and were never counted.

A controversy has arisen here over the apparent neglect or illegal payoffs for the needed licenses that allowed an industry such as the fireworks plant and warehouse to store tons of explosives in a residential neighborhood.

Because the row houses nearest the blast site were inexpensive rentals, the neighborhood had become a magnet for immigrants such as Ali Joughlaf who came to the Netherlands in the 1960s and ‘70s--when the country needed blue-collar labor--and then had to depend on social assistance after small manufacturers were shut down by competition from Asia.

The area had been bolstered in recent years by refugees from the former Yugoslav federation and northern Africa, and many of them housed friends and relatives who had made their way here illegally, their neighbors say.

“It wasn’t something you talked about with them, but everybody knew that there were a lot of people without papers,” recalls Ibrahim Joughlaf, who suspects, as do most who lived through the disaster, that the names of some missing or dead may never come to official attention.

The younger Joughlaf’s losses are unlikely to be compensated because he was no longer registered to live in his parents’ four-bedroom home, although he spent more time there than at his own apartment. His old Renault and his father’s Mercedes-Benz were both pummeled into total losses by the explosions, and although the plant owners’ insurance may ultimately have to compensate victims such as the Joughlafs, their claims are likely to involve years of litigation.

Many residents of the neighborhood devastated by the blast say they never realized that they were living near a powder keg.

“I’ve lived in that house for all my 30 years and never knew it was there,” Daniela Bosch, a receptionist renting a house owned by her father that was now missing much of its roof, doors and windows, says of the fireworks factory that was just a few blocks away. “People would have protested if they had known what was being stored there.”

Now that the first shock of the disaster has worn off, so, too, has the initial willingness to count one’s blessings and be grateful to have survived at all.

“The whole town was saddened by this tragedy, but now it’s turning to anger,” says Annelies Futsclaar, a special-education teacher who has been marshaling food baskets and sponsors for those whose homes were leveled by the explosions. “People are asking how it could have been possible to have such a danger right in the center of town. Even the firefighters didn’t know when they went in what they would be facing.”

For those who were living in the shadows in hopes of one day finding work and proper homes here, the lost shelter is likely now to expose them to deportation, because Dutch immigration policy seldom tolerates breaches of the visa rules.

“Those who have no papers will have to go back--even those who were wounded, once they have healed,” the younger Joughlaf predicts of some friends and neighbors. “Everyone is very loving and sympathetic now, but this will change because there are too many victims to care for.”

Because he and three of his five siblings were born here after their parents immigrated, Joughlaf has Dutch citizenship and therefore qualifies for state assistance now that he has no savings, no car and little prospect of getting back to work soon.

“When you grow up here, you learn to live like the Dutch people, and I still want to earn my own living,” the demoralized young man says. “But I don’t know if I can do that now. I never realized everything I worked for could be blown away in seconds.”