No room for fatalism

On Friday afternoon, I had fleeting insight into what life must have been like for my grandparents’ generation 70 years ago: sitting quietly at home then hearing and feeling a terrific bomb explosion and wondering whether it was safe to go outside, doing so and seeing smoke rising high and flames spreading through the fields.

I cannot understand how the most frequent description on the internet and in the newspapers is that the Dwejra fireworks explosion felt like “an earthquake”. Do earthquakes explode?

It felt like what it was, an explosion so massive that even though it happened on a hillock around a couple of miles away from our home, I thought somebody had planted a bomb outside one of the houses up the road.

Looking at the scene of destruction in the distance across the valley, I knew immediately that nobody could have survived it, not those raging fires, those rocks hurtling in all directions. And because it happened on the eve of fireworks night, I also knew that people would have been in the workshop.

Reading about it in the newspapers, one feels removed from these things, but watching them happen, knowing that people have died, is deeply upsetting. I had to go back indoors.

Last October, the Bidnija fireworks workshop blew up and one man died there, but I was away at the time and saw nothing of it.

As I write this, the reports are that one man has died and that his body has been found. There is confused and confusing information as to how many are missing, presumed dead, if any at all. But even one is too many.

You can argue that he let himself in for it, that like people who love dangerous sports he knew the risks involved. So you would react to somebody who blew himself up – or was blown up – in a fireworks workshop about the same way as you might react to somebody who died trying to climb a mountain-face where several others had died before: that it was their choice, because they knew the risks.

But making fireworks is not a dangerous sport. It is a business activity that has significant consequences for others when things go wrong. Those who fall off mountains do so alone, but when fireworks workshops blow up, they do so in the midst of us all. And it doesn’t even have to be a workshop, as the disaster in Naxxar a couple of years ago demonstrated.

Every time there is a fireworks-related disaster, we hear the same things: the government should do something; we need tougher rules, stricter controls. But nothing happens.

It is supremely ironic, and would be considered ridiculous were it not so tragic, that in the week when a spectacle is made of six young men who swam naked and were given a criminal record, we find ourselves with an explosion of this magnitude which happened because the police cannot control the very things they are there to control.

This is a country in which you can play with gunpowder in a room in a field but where you can’t take your clothes off and go for a swim at night.

What drives me to utter distraction is the air of fatalism which imbues all the news reports and most of the internet and verbal comments on this latest explosion. This was not an act of God, but an act of man.

Somebody, and not necessarily the dead man, made it happen through carelessness or recklessness. Chemistry, unlike the weather, is not random, and making fireworks is chemistry. Chemical formulae, like mathematics, are entirely predictable. That’s why they’re called formulae. X + Y = Z.

To get a different result – and one of those different results is an explosion – you have to change something, either deliberately or through dereliction, or allow it to change through an uncontrolled environment.

I feel like knocking heads together when I hear people discuss the making of fireworks as though it is some arcane art and not just another chemical procedure. There is nothing arcane about it; science is science.

The trouble here – the fundamental problem which underpins all the disasters and explosions – is that the people who make those fireworks and who work in the ‘factories’ are not scientists. Some of them are not even literate.

They get their licences on the basis of knowing by rote how to make and handle specific things, but not being chemists they are unable to foresee the consequences of any deviation from the norm.

A chemist knows why an explosion is caused; somebody with a licence to make fireworks knows only how it is caused, and sometimes – as we have seen – not even that.

Explosions of this nature are avoidable. We cannot carry on colluding in the myth that they are not. It says a lot about how we view these giant messes that most people compared Friday’s explosion to an earthquake (natural disaster, outside our control, fatalism) rather than to the more obvious and accurate bomb (man-made, within human control, requiring action).

Fatalism or the belief that fireworks are arcane and unpredictable is also what feeds the calls for a total ban on their manufacture. Why ban something when you can solve the problem by regulating it?

This article was published in The Malta Independent on Sunday on 15 August.