At breakfast time on March 3, 1988, a workshop exploded in the Nobel Bozel dynamite factory where my father worked as maintenance engineer, killing five people, all the top executives except my father, who by some miraculous chance had forgotten some papers and was out of the workshop when it happened. My brother and I, his wife and our daughters went to visit the factory last Sunday. The gates had been closed for 27 years, and somehow have been broken open a few weeks ago. It was like entering Sleeping Beauty’s castle, completely overgrown with lilac and birch trees growing out of roofs and windows. Incredible graffitis covered the walls. The Nobel company must have decided the cost of decontaminating the land was more than the real estate value and will have forgotten it as an unproductive asset in their books. A guy in military clothes walked out of the derelict office building when we passed the gates: a paint ball game was under way. They stopped it while we walked around, in wonder. We finished with the office, where we found papers in my father’s name, and signed by him, left undisturbed for nearly 30 years… My father never really spoke about the explosion, the shock of losing his colleagues and having to recognise the bits of body and assist the enquiry must have been a heavy burden. He also had to go out and find another job at age 50 (as the factory was closed), but being the strong person he was, he moved on. Without really discussing it, we had always assumed it had been criminal: an explosion had killed three workers three years earlier, and there was an uncomfortable atmosphere between workers and the executives, fueled by some virulent communist propaganda, where the “patronat” (employers) was accused of putting people’s lives in danger in the name of profit. Death threats against my father and his colleagues had been issued several times. Considering how staunchly socialist my father always was and how he cared for everyone working at the factory, it must have been mortifying. What we have started to realise only recently is how dangerous the process of making dynamite was, these factories don’t exist any more, the ingredients for making dynamite are now assembled only when it needs to be used to limit the risk of untimely explosion. The real miracle is that there were no more accidents. So maybe it wasn’t criminal after all. There was nothing left after the explosion, so very few clues anyway, and little desire from any party to spend more time investigating further. What is left is a strange world of wild flowers and jungle, broken roofs, and a human fauna of paint ballers and scavengers. Cf http://www.ouest-france.fr/personne-na-oublie-les-usines-nobel-1053703

The water tower in which my father fell one Sunday as he was checking the water level. It took him hours to climb up a rope that was fortunately dangling from the top. He came back home with bloody hands, but alive.

Was this the workshop that exploded? Who knows… Vegetation has taken over everywhere and broken all the walls.

Another miracle: lilac is growing everywhere – it was my father’s favorite flower!

My father must be smiling in his grave, seeing his grand daughters walk around his offices!