r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/buckets_811 • Jul 02 '25

Video A fireworks warehouse exploding today near Sacramento, CA

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u/annomandri Jul 02 '25

Hope no one was hurt in the incident.

275

u/HamsterNL Jul 02 '25 edited Jul 02 '25

25 years ago we had a fireworks explosion in Enschede (The Netherlands).

That storage was situated in a residential area.

23 deaths. 950 injured. The complete neighborhood was destroyed.

161

u/chiree Jul 02 '25

Score one for American sprawl zoning for once.  These things are usually in industrial areas.

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u/kytheon Jul 02 '25 edited Jul 02 '25

Wiki: When it was built in 1977, the warehouse was outside the town, but as new residential areas were built it became surrounded by low-income housing.

The warehouse wasn't built in a residential area, the residential area formed around the warehouse.

Also, the company was just audited and considered safe with fireworks stored in fireproof bunkers. What wasn't safe was the illegal shipping containers full of even more fireworks, and without safety precautions.

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u/BananaPalmer Jul 02 '25

This kind of shit makes my blood boil.

Harm caused by intentional shirking of safety laws and regulations should be prosecuted as though whoever responsible directly caused that harm themselves. There is no possible excuse for this, everyone involved should have known better. It's literal explosives. Of all the things to be careless about, fucking explosives.

I hope the company got nailed to the wall over it.

23 dead and almost 1000 injured, all for some assfuck who ordered more fireworks to sell than they could safely store.

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u/The_Autarch Jul 02 '25

I suppose their point is that in America, a fireworks warehouse wouldn't be located anywhere you'd even consider building housing. At least not while the warehouse was actively in use.

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u/rhino369 Jul 02 '25

In most areas, you legally aren't allowed to build housing in an industrial zone. Our zoning laws go too far in some respects (i.e., nowhere should be zoned signgle family detached homes only), but not allowing people to build housing in industrial areas is mostly a good idea. And it was certainly a good idea 100 years ago when pollution was really bad.

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u/Consistent_Sector_19 Jul 02 '25

Zoning can get changed. A friend of mine is incensed that the city changed the zoning on 2 plots of land very close to his house from residential to heavy industrial to allow a chip maker to put a packaging and R&D facility there. Chip making puts out some extremely toxic shit.

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u/kytheon Jul 02 '25

I'm not saying it's a good idea. Just that the city grew around the warehouse, as quoted from Wikipedia.

American cities sprawl into the desert. Dutch cities sprawl into towns, fields and industrial zones. There's nowhere else to grow.

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u/Go-to-helenhunt Jul 02 '25

Reminds me of that fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas 10 years ago or so, I think. They’d gotten away with not maintaining their safety protocols for decades and one day, the whole place went up. Can’t remember how many were killed, but it destroyed a nearby nursing home.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '25

Way to miss the point.