Yeah, the whole in the city Beirut nitrate explosion hit me rather hard, and I know many with me. I was born and raised in Enschede and although I wasn’t living there any longer at the time I was their visiting friends, sitting on a terrace and enjoying a really nice sunny day when the firework disaster hit. It is a surreal experience to see large pieces of stone coming down out of nowhere in the middle of town…
None of the people I know got seriously hurt, some did loose their businesses: (as in: No building left). 23 others died and about a 1000 got injured.
We were very lucky. It was a beautiful sunny Saturday and that many people where enjoying the sun elsewhere (first beautiful weekend if I recall correctly) and the neighboring Grolsch beer brewery had some silos with explosive stuff that got spared the brunt of the explosion and the fire brigade was able to keep cool after that. It could have been so much worse…
Not nearly as devastating as what happened in Beirut but I have a reasonable good idea what it was like and the devastation that must have happened there.
Who the fuck thinks it is a good idea to store explosive in the middle of a city.