Bulgaria explosives factory blast kills 15

[Siege]

A blast at an explosives factory north of the Bulgarian capital Sofia has killed 15 people, prompting the government to declare Friday a day of national mourning.

Thirteen men and two women were killed, and three other women employees hurt, at the factory near Gorni Lom.

"The blast was so powerful that it left craters," civil defence force director Nikolay Nikolov said.

He said the cause of the explosion was probably "human error".

With the country holding a general election on Sunday, one leading politician said his party was muting its campaign as a sign of respect.

Former Prime Minister Boiko Borisov, whose Gerb party is tipped to win against the outgoing Socialists, told Bulgarian TV station 24 Hours that concerts and other events would be called off.

The explosion occurred at around 17:00 (14:00 GMT) on Wednesday with a big secondary blast reported at 21:45.

The factory, some 120km (75 miles) north of Sofia, destroys stockpiles of obsolete munitions for the Bulgarian army and Dnes daily newspaper quoted an expert as saying it had been handling explosives from Greece.

Some 10 tonnes of highly explosive chemicals were being stored at the plant.

When they say "left craters" they're not exaggerating. This site shows images taken by 'army drones' (but they could be helicopters for all I know). There's no factory left, the place and everything around it is basically a giant hole in the ground.

[Sea Skimmer]

Same place blew up several times before; none of the blasts however being remotely comparable to those which have taken place in Russian and the Ukraine in recent history, several of those were comparable to small nuclear weapons. The Soviets designed less then ideally ammo and they and the Warsaw Pact produced it in vast quantities which were seldom ever stored properly. You've got to cut corners somewhere when you need ammo for 300,000 tanks and artillery pieces but have rather low per capita GDPs. The result is a nightmarish demilitarization problem that leads to lots of explosions in the dismantlement and storage facilities.

As of 2004 when the demil program began Bulgaria had identified 76,000 tons of obsolete ammunition it needed to dispose of. Including something like two million shells, bombs, rockets and grenades and fifty five million cartridges, fuses and military pyrotechics. Some of them have no safety features what so ever.

Western demil sites sometimes blowup too, but generally safer munitions, better storage and a lot more money for automation means its rare that anyone dies anymore. Everyone's production sites still blow up from time to time, but in effect the Soviets just never really got past 1920s standards of explosive safety and now people are paying for it. Actually long have been, as seen by say, the 1984 explosion that destroyed almost the entire missile stock of the Soviet Northern Fleet.