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The city of Toulouse, in the south of France, commemorates this Tuesday an explosion at the AZF chemical plant in which 31 people were killed 20 years ago.
Like every commemorative event since what has been described as “the most serious industrial disaster in France since 1945”, the commemorations take place in a dispersed order.
This, against a background of acrimony between certain associations of victims and former employees of the AZF factory, who refuse to participate in the official ceremony – which takes place on the site of the former chemical plant, south of Toulouse.
The explosion, which occurred 10 days after the September 11 attacks, left 31 dead, thousands injured and triggered panic throughout the city. Investigators initially thought the series of explosions were caused by a terrorist attack, but the accident was later blamed on the poorly managed storage of 300 tonnes of ammonium nitrate.
The explosion recorded 3.4 on the Richter scale, with an explosive force equivalent to 40 tons of TNT.
Long-standing resentment
Victims’ associations have always held the Grande Paroisse – the operating company AZF and a subsidiary of the French energy giant Total – responsible for the explosion.
There has long been resentment against former AZF employees for agreeing to appear alongside Total representatives at commemorations.
Former AZF employees and executives say the explosion was an accident and have struggled to come to terms with the plant’s closure since 2001.
This Tuesday, after sirens sounded in the city at 10:17 a.m., the names of those who lost their lives were read, a wreath was laid and a minute of silence was observed.
The mayor of Toulouse, Jean-Luc Moudenc, unveiled a memorial made up of “nine school benches retracing the history of the factory, its industrial past from 1924 to the present day, the disaster itself, the post-period. disaster, trials and site renewal “.
The content of the new memorial was “developed under the direction of a scientific committee made up of historians, sociologists and town planners”, according to Francis Grass, the deputy mayor in charge of cultural and memorial policies, anxious not to revive tensions between victims’ associations and former AZF employees.
Conditional sentence for plant manager
In a second AZF appeal trial in 2017, the Paris Court of Appeal sentenced the former factory manager to a 15-month suspended prison sentence and a € 45,000 fine and € 225,000 fine to the company.
Both were found guilty of “gross negligence” committed by “clumsiness”, “inadvertently” or “failure to comply with the obligation of care”.
Their two subsequent counter-appeals were dismissed on December 17, 2019, eighteen years after the disaster.
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