Massive blasts, then a gruesome search: Days ahead of Thrissur Pooram, fireworks tragedy kills 14 in Kerala

By the time darkness fell on Tuesday, the search in the field had shifted entirely from rescue to retrieval. The dead were being counted in pieces. Dozens of volunteers moved slowly through the one-and-a-half-acre field, carefully looking for human remains and collecting them.

Several houses in the area had also suffered damage due to the impact of the blasts. Joshiy, who lives near the field, said he heard the explosions from his house and ran. He was among the first to reach the spot following the incident. The first man he recognised on the ground was Mundathikode Satheeshan, the licensed operator of the fireworks unit, a man Joshiy has known for years. He was severely injured.

Satheeshan was engaged to assemble the fireworks by the Thiruvambadi Sri Krishna Temple, one of the organisers of the Pooram festival. He has a years-long track record of successfully conducting fireworks shows for Pooram.

First responders

Local residents like Joshiy were the first responders at the site. They used what vehicles they could find, including autos and private cars, to ferry the injured to hospital.

The fire force took close to an hour and a half to arrive, locals said, with the narrow access roads leading to the site hampering rescue operations. After the initial round of explosions stopped, an earthmover that happened to be in the next field was used to clear a path wide enough for fire engines and other emergency vehicles to arrive. Even after the arrival of the rescue services, secondary explosions kept going off in the field, forcing further delays to avoid putting rescuers at risk.

Police rushed to Satheeshan’s house, looking for employment records to figure out how many workers may have been at the site, but could not find anything. The most reliable figure anyone had was the count of lunch packets that had been sent to the site earlier in the day — 35. Speaking to reporters, state minister Muhammed Riyas acknowledged that the government did not know how many workers had been there. The numbers being reported, he said, might not match reality. The number could be lower.

Hours earlier

The field had been used for assembling Pooram fireworks samples for close to two decades, according to neighbours. On Tuesday morning, hours before the explosions, the unit had even let outsiders in.

Television crews and social media creators were allowed to walk around the field with cameras, microphones, and lights. The footage that came out now amounts to a record of what was lost. Elderly women were among the workers, seated on the ground, assembling fireworks, in a green field that had been entirely cleared by fire hours later.

Hareesh Vasudevan, a lawyer at the Kerala High Court and a longtime environmental activist, has tracked fireworks regulation in the state for years. On Tuesday evening, he said what had happened at Mundathicode was a consequence, not a surprise. “The Explosives Act is routinely violated. The deep, body-shaking sound that audiences expect from a Pooram fireworks display comes from nitrate compounds that cannot be legally obtained under the LE-6 licence that governs public fireworks under the Explosives Rules, 2008,” Vasudevan said.

“The law requires samples to be tested for nitrate before approval. In practise, contractors keep clean samples aside specifically for testing and reserve the banned material for the actual display. When a license is denied, the matter is escalated. The contractor and the devaswom (temple-governing bodies approach the High Court. The court grants permission under conditions. This has happened for Thrissur Pooram in each of the last two years,” he alleged.

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has ordered Rs 50 lakh released to the district collector for immediate relief. The Prime Minister has announced an ex gratia of Rs 2 lakh each for the families of the dead and Rs 50,000 for the injured.

Thrissur District Collector Sikha Surendran has ordered a magisterial inquiry.

This is the deadliest fireworks accident in Kerala since April 2016, when a storehouse of unauthorised fireworks ignited at the Puttingal Devi temple in Kollam district and killed more than 100 people. That disaster prompted a three-year judicial inquiry and a set of recommendations, which, people familiar with their status allege, were never fully implemented.