Talking to friends who had been evacuated from their home in the immediate aftermath of the St Helen’s fireworks factory explosion, I remarked that I believe our besetting problems with hunting, fireworks, racism, prejudice against women, tal-muzew frenzy, Dun Gorg hysteria and xenophobia are interlinked. They all have their root in the most abject kind of primitive and irrational thinking, and in all cases, it is the banner of tradition that is waved, and not of ignorance.
People who persist in these views and actions, which grow out of ignorance and sheer stupidity, are allowed to labour under the delusion that they are in the right. The situation has been allowed to deteriorate so badly that they have moved from imagining they are correct to thinking that they have a right to hold the rest of the country hostage to their whims and desires, to dominate the public agenda, and to be put first, even ahead of law-abiding, peace-loving citizens.
They get credence from politicians who crawl like lackeys in search of one more vote. They trample over the rights of others. No door is slammed shut in their faces, as all doors should be slammed in the faces of those who wish to keep this country in the 19th century. I have written endlessly about hunting, racism, prejudice against women, tal-muzew (though not enough of that yet), xenophobia and saints and relics. So because five men have died in a mammoth explosion that had families evacuated and many thousands of liri of damage caused to personal property, let me today speak about the manufacture of fireworks. It’s not the first time I’ve written about this. The last time was when a similar explosion in Haz-Zebbug killed some men. Our political and church leaders rushed to the communal funeral in the same way, and possibly also for the same reasons that they rushed to the canonisation ceremony of Dun Gorg Preca. I said at the time that their presence at the funeral was a great mistake. The President, the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and senior clergy should be out in force only at the funerals of outstanding citizens who have contributed greatly to public life. Their presence en masse at a funeral has nothing to do with personal sympathy for people from whom they wish to gain votes – or should have nothing to do with it, anyway. It is the ultimate sign of respect for the individual in the coffin and for what he or she has achieved in his or her lifetime. I find it most annoying that none of our political leaders seems to be aware of the finer points of protocol and that what they do and don’t do, say and don’t say, communicates a very powerful message to those who are watching. My point then was that no politician should have been at that funeral because the men concerned were not martyrs, but careless husbands and irresponsible fathers of young children, who imperilled themselves and put the lives and property of others at risk. Their behaviour was far from exemplary. I myself would define it as reprehensible, irresponsible and even criminally dangerous. To confuse the nature of their deaths with those of the workers who died in the notorious shipboard explosion at Malta Drydocks, for example, is to show extremely poor understanding of the two very different situations.
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The explosion a few days ago has strengthened my views on this matter. Anybody who tries to sell home-made cakes without the requisite food safety certification is immediately visited by the public health authorities and the cakes whisked off the market, lest they give customers diarrhoea. Yet anyone who wants to play with fire and make explosives, endangering the lives and property of others and creating untold inconvenience for a great number of people and public services, can do so – as long as they have a police licence, which is not linked to safety practices or training, still less routine monitoring by health and safety authorities. The ladies who make cakes in their kitchens can’t hold politicians hostage in the same way that the partitarji of village saints can do. Making cakes is not a tradition. Making fireworks is. Funny how all our so-called “traditions” are really nothing but the hobbies of a certain kind of man.
Last summer I had a massive row with a traffic policeman who was positioned halfway down St Catherine Street, the dilapidated track that leads past the fireworks factory that has just exploded. The row was caused by the fact that I wasn’t meant to be driving through that street, and so got a ticket. The solution the police had found to the problem of a fireworks factory next to a public road along which there were private houses was this: putting up a sign at either end, denying access to all but farmers with land there, workers at the fireworks factory, and residents of the private houses. My anger wasn’t caused by the fact that I had been given a ticket. Technically, the policeman was right to give me one. It was caused by the insanity of the situation. Instead of closing down the fireworks factory or relocating it, the police found a “solution” in minimising the number of people who might be killed or maimed if it blew up – by not allowing them into what had for generations been a public road. The insanity of this reasoning was compounded by the fact that, in preventing people from entering the road for their own safety, the police were acknowledging that there was a serious risk of endangerment. So what about the people who lived there, and the farmers who worked in their fields? Their safety counted for less, apparently, than the right of a bunch of amateurs to fiddle about with gunpowder in primitive, unsafe, unregulated and unmonitored conditions, in a few overheated huts. “You don’t deny citizens the right to use a public road!” I yelled at the policeman, infuriated. “You remove the fireworks factory that is the source of danger. Or are we living in a country run by savages, according to what the savages want?” “Calm down, Mrs Caruana Galizia,” he said. “I always read your articles.” As though that had anything to do with the price of eggs.
The situation is considered so risky by the police that they won’t even allow people who are visiting friends and family who live there into the road, nor even tradesmen and deliverymen who are rendering a service. Not even the gas delivery truck is allowed in – especially not the gas delivery truck. Why? In case any of them die if the factory blows up while they’re driving through, as a woman nearly died earlier this week when the blast shaved the roof off her car. Yet minibuses packed with schoolchildren regularly use the road, ignoring the No Entry sign in the same way that I ignored it myself. The way a rational person reasons is this: if the danger really were that great, the police would put up a barbed wire fence forcibly preventing people from entering the road. If they haven’t done that, then the danger can’t be that great, so I’ll ignore the sign and drive in.
Commonsense dictates that it is the source of the danger that should be removed, and not the people – particularly since the houses and the public road were there before the fireworks factory arrived in 1982. But since when was this country run according to commonsense, and not according to the demands of the various primitive “traditionalists”?
This is the third time that the fireworks factory in question has exploded in just 13 years. In 1994, it blew up and one man died. One of the men who died in last week’s explosion was there at the time, and instead of thanking his lucky starts for that narrow escape, he persisted in his bloody-minded pursuit until he died in another explosion. The factory blew up again in 2000, but nobody was killed that day. You can argue that everyone has the right to put themselves at risk if they want to; it’s a free country. But no. Nobody has any right to put themselves at risk when they are also endangering the lives and property of others, and when their crazy behaviour places a great burden on civil protection personnel and hospitals. That’s why the wearing of car seat belts and motorcycle crash helmets is mandatory and not optional.
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The Labour Party, whose leader is quick to pander to the desires of every group of irate citizens that he can sniff out, is unsurprisingly silent on this one. The only reason that the St Helen’s fireworks factory is where it was until it was blown up is that the Labour government of 1982 relocated it there. The government wanted to get the fireworks factory out of the way so that it could parcel up the surrounding land into “plots” – a favourite vote-catching pastime in those days. I can only imagine that the residents of the houses near the factory’s new location were not taken into consideration because they were a mixture of tal-pepe and barranin – and we know how the Labour government of the day loved that kind of person. I won’t go so far as to say that the fireworks factory was deliberately located there, though I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that were the case. All I know is that when Dom Mintoff had a power station located near one of his several homes, he sued the government and got almost half a million liri in compensation, though his home remained intact.
Nothing remains of the fireworks factory now. It is completely demolished. The blast was so great that it knocked right through several metres of solid rock in the quarry wall, sending a landslide of boulders into the private garden on the other side, causing thousands of liri in damage and nearly killing the gardener who run for shelter immediately he heard the high whistling sound that signalled the onset of an explosion. This is the time for the Malta Environment and Planning Authority, that persecutor of people who build swimming-pools and conservatories – those great endangerments to life and health – to step in and review the situation. If it is not mandated to do so, then who in hell’s name is? Within two days of the blast, a truck was seen and photographed driving into the site with concrete beams. The St Helen’s fireworks factory should not be permitted to rise, literally, from its ashes. In view of the three explosions in 13 years, which killed six men and damaged the property of neighbouring houses, there are reasons enough for revoking both the lease and the permit.
The people who live near the factory have been protesting for years – as one of them told me, always in fear because the people they are protesting against make explosives. In May 2000, the police informed the residents that the factory’s licence had not been renewed for that year, which came as a surprise to them because it had blown up just two months previously, spewing boulders over private houses, breaking solar panels and damaging a car – and now they were being told that when it blew up, it was unlicensed.
The factory got its licence for the following year and every year since then (it is renewed annually), with the police arguing that it is lawfully sited in terms of the Explosives Ordinance, which I imagine was devised to regulate military activity, rather than the totally unnecessary and frivolous activities of fireworks enthusiasts. They argue that the factory is situated more than 183 metres from an inhabited place, which is defined in the Explosives Ordinance as somewhere 100 people or more live. A few families do not count. They argue that the public road is not public because it is closed to all except residents, farmers and fireworks workers – yes, because they put up signs saying so in 2000. It was a public road before that. And so, by dint of this magical thinking and pragmatic reasoning, the factory’s licence is in order and the police are satisfied that they are in line with the law. Yet what sort of law is it that allows a factory which has blown up three times, killing six men, and damaging private property, to persist with its activities?
It would be obvious to any reasonable person that the Explosives Ordnance, which allows the location of fireworks factories right next to private homes if there are fewer than 100 people living in them, is appalling and out of date. It reveals a horribly mercenary and calculating view in which fewer than 100 lives can be put at risk, but any more than 100 and it’s a problem. Even if there is just one house with one person living in it, there should be no fireworks factory, if the house was there first. A callous lack of regard for the rights of individuals, especially those individuals whom it despised – tal-pepe and foreigners – was the defining characteristic of the Labour government of the time. It is curious indeed that the effects of a spiteful decision taken by the government then should be allowed to persist to this day.
And it’s not just the fireworks factories that we should be worrying about. Few of us have ever stopped to wonder how the fireworks get from the factory to the village. The answer is that they get there in unmarked vans on busy roads. It’s only a matter of time before one of those vans blows up in the middle of a traffic jam. But I don’t suppose the powers-that-be will take action even then. After all, look at all these fireworks factories that have blown up, and the politicians take a primitive and fatalistic approach, treating the dead like martyrs and rushing to their funerals.
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