Early Thursday evening at 2:58 AM my wife Nadia shook me awake and asked if I left the door open. She heard a loud noise and assumed I left the door open and the wind blew it shut. I didn’t think much of it and went back to bed. That morning I decided not to check my email like I usually do and instead did a yoga workout and went for a swim. I was in the pool when Nadia came out and said that a warehouse near the airport exploded. That was the noise she heard.
I quickly got out of the pool and changed and went to the Crisis Response Team Google Chat to call the team together. We wanted to check if anyone from the school community was injured or if it was a terrorist attack and we would be on lockdown. Through Telegram, calling the facilities manager, and news reports, we discovered that it was an accidental explosion. The manager, Rashid is the community member living closest to the blast and all employees were fine. The blast took place about 6 kilometers from the school and my home as the crow flies in an industrial district with low-income apartment blocks, so I was pretty sure none of our families lived there.
The cause of the blast is uncertain. From the best information I found, it was electric car batteries and bleach that exploded. A lot of new BYD (Build Your Dreams) Chinese electric cars were damaged as they were parked nearby. The students were finding ashes on our campus on the ground during the morning break. An odor of burnt plastic wafted into campus mid-morning, but our air quality monitors had healthy numbers so we kept everyone outside as usual. One teenager died in the blast and hundreds were injured.
I visited the site today, Monday, to check it out. There were police, ambulances, soldiers, and construction workers at and near the site. Smoke was still coming from the rubble as cranes and construction trucks were cleaning the site. Many workers were replacing windows in the apartment blocks across the street from the warehouse. It was probably 200 meters between the first row of apartments and the warehouse so it must have been a powerful blast.
I hope they figure out what caused the explosion so it does not happen again. My condolences to the family of the young person who died. The government is doing a good job of caring for the injured and repairing the apartments. There were many soldiers and construction people installing windows, cleaning debris, and repairing damaged buildings.
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