Andhra Pradesh cracker unit blast: Firework flashes and silhouetted grief 

Like every other day, Sangarthi Jayalakshmi, in her mid-30s, prepared a lunchbox for her husband, Sangarthi Govindu, 41, on April 13. She saw him off to work from the doorstep of their modest house in Kailasapatnam village, Kotavuratla mandal, Anakapalli district, Andhra Pradesh.

Around 1 p.m. that day, Jayalakshmi received a phone call asking her to rush to the firecracker unit where Govindu had been working for 12 years. She was told that the blast she heard a few minutes ago was from the firecracker unit, and the room where the workers manufactured the crackers had collapsed after an explosion.

The shock of reality hit her when she saw the charred remains of the firecracker unit and learnt that the locals, police and fire personnel were trying to retrieve her husband’s body from underneath the sooty heap of rubble, which was now emanating a thick grey smoke after the fire was doused.

Govindu, along with seven others, died in the blast at the main unit of a licensed firecracker manufacturing plant that day. Eight others, including the owner, were grievously injured with burns varying from 90% to 30% severity. Of the two workers who were in critical condition, one died on April 17.

Days after the blast, Jayalakshmi and her two children are still learning to picture Govindu’s smiling face as they are haunted by the memories of the charred remains of his body.

“My father, Govindu, was a farmer, a daily wager, and a man full of dreams,” says his daughter, Lahari, 20, a B. Tech student at an engineering college in Rajamahendravaram, 130 kilometres away. “He always wanted us to grow in life and not turn into daily wage workers like him and struggle to make ends meet,” recollects a teary-eyed Lahari.  

“He always wanted us to grow in life and not turn into daily wage workers like him and struggle to make ends meet,” recollects a teary-eyed Lahari.

“My father wanted us to focus on our studies and would tell us to study hard to become successful in life. He would always say, ‘Money won’t be a problem for your education.’ He took up the risky daily wage work at the firecracker unit despite owning a piece of land where he grew paddy only to fund our education; so that we could have a better life,” says Govindu’s inconsolable son Mahesh, 18, who is studying Class 12.

On April 13, around 12.45 p.m., a huge explosion rocked the Vijayalakshmi Fireworks unit, which was established in 2012 and operated by Janakiram, 47. It was among the hundreds of licensed units spread from East Godavari to Srikakulam in the north-coastal Andhra Pradesh. The unit is situated approximately 2 kilometres from Kailasapatnam, in a forested area surrounded by agricultural fields.

Four of the nine people who died were from Kailasapatnam, and the others were from the neighbouring districts of East Godavari and Visakhapatnam.

The deceased have been identified as: P. Papa, 40; G. Venubabu, 34; S. Govindu, 41; and A. Pallayya, 50 — all from Kailasapatnam; D. Ramalakshmi, 35, from Rajupeta; S. Babu Rao, 55, from Chowduvada; D. Nirmala, 38, from Vetlapalem; Hemanth, 20, from Bheemunipatnam; and J. Nagaraju, 50, from Ratnalapalem.

Village shrouded in sorrow

A week before the blast, Kailasapatnam, a tiny village 50 kilometres from the district headquarters of Anakapalli, with just over 600 houses and a population of 2,000, bustled with activity as the villagers prepared for an upcoming local deity festival. Flexies that welcomed politicians, lighting, and festoons filled the village with merry.

However, after the final rites of four of their own, the festival has taken a backseat as they mourn the deaths. Villagers gathered at tea shops, saying they dearly missed them as they reminisced about their memories.

The impact of the blast was so powerful that it sent tremors all the way to the Kotavuratla police station, about 8 km from the blast site. The police personnel say they felt the shudder as they heard the blast.

Four out of the five structures in the firecracker manufacturing unit were wrecked and only the storeroom remained intact.

“We are lucky that the fire did not reach the storeroom located a few metres away from the main unit, where the blast occurred; otherwise, the impact of the blast and the fire that followed would have been much worse,” says Regional Fire Officer Niranjan Reddy.

About 16 workers were working in the main unit, a shed measuring about 30 feet by 40 feet in area.

Rescue, a challenge

As the rescue operations began, the blast site resembled a war zone—the air filled with smoke from the explosion and despair from the wailing of those who lost their dear ones, as locals, police, and fire personnel got into action to rescue the victims from under the rubble.

The units, which were constructed with brick walls and asbestos ceilings, were reduced to rubble. The police, the fire personnel and the locals had to clear the debris to pull out the bodies and the eight others who were injured.

The air near the unit, even after two days of the explosion, continued to smell of sulphur.

“Since the factory was located inside a forested area, the fire spread in the woods and we had to park our engines on the road front, use long hoses and sprinklers to douse it and then clear the debris, pull out the bodies and rescue the injured,” says Reddy.

Work fraught with danger

The Kailasapatnam firecracker unit blast, however, is not a stray incident, as per official records. Visakhapatnam and Anakapalli districts saw at least six such blasts, wherein over 30 people have died in the last 10 years.

Mandals such as Devarapalli, Anakapalle (both rural and urban), Chodavaram, Butchayyapeta, Kasimkota, Gokulapadu, and Narsipatnam in the two districts are also notorious for housing illegal cracker units.

In March 2015, in Gokulapadu village of Visakhapatnam district, eight workers, including four women and two minor girls, died, and four others were seriously injured in a blast at an illegal factory.

In August 2016, four workers died and three suffered severe burn injuries at an illegal unit in A-Kothapalli village in Devarapalli mandal under Chodavaram Police Circle in the erstwhile Visakhapatnam district. Both incidents were widely reported in the media.

According to Tuhin Sinha, the Superintendent of Police of Anakapalli, there are approximately 35 legal firecracker units in the district, of which 21 are currently operational.

“But the catch here is that the illegal units thrive here, and they manufacture firecrackers by employing the locals. There are no official records, and most of them do not follow the safety protocols or train the employees to handle the explosive material,” says Sinha.

Many of them are fly-by-night operators. They surface overnight and close after the festival season, which includes Dasara and the village deity festivals during the summer. According to a senior police official, they operate from small sheds.

The anatomy of tragedy

The ingredients used to manufacture firecrackers are unstable, and workers do not receive sufficient training to handle them safely. According to an expert from the Visakhapatnam City Police’s Bomb Detection Squad, most firecracker production is conducted in highly hazardous conditions. Workers operate in cramped sheds, and materials are stored near the work site.

An expert from the Visakhapatnam City Police’s bomb detection squad says a tiny spark while stuffing the chemicals into the cracker shells can cause a high-intensity blast.

The raw materials generally consist of sulphur, charcoal powder, and ‘electric powder’. The expert says the ‘electric powder’, which includes highly unstable chemicals such as aluminium powder and potassium perchlorate, is used to produce more flash and sound.

Sometimes, the manufacturers also use a variant of this electric powder, which includes a banned chemical that insurgents usually use to make improvised explosive devices. The cracker manufacturers procure this chemical from the grey market and use it to produce crackers with a high decibel sound, he added.

Reddy, furthermore, opines that storing unstable material in close confinement and working in proximity is suicidal, even if safety equipment such as fire hose, sand and water buckets and fire extinguishers is in place.

“In such accidents, people die mainly due to the high intensity of the blast and then by the fire caused by it,” he says.

Though the forensic reports of the Kailasapatnam blast are awaited, experts from the fire department suggest that negligent use of explosive raw material could be the cause.

“Moreover, the workers were not trained to handle the raw material, and they were under pressure to produce more crackers due to the demand from village festival organisers in the rural areas of the north coastal districts of Andhra Pradesh,” says Reddy.

Government response

Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu expressed grief over the accident and ordered an inquiry into it. He also directed the officials to ensure the best possible treatment for the injured and assured them that the State Government would provide all help to the victims.

Home Minister V. Anitha, who visited the blast site on the same day as the accident, states that although the exact cause of the explosion has yet to be determined, the police suspect that theapplication of high pressure during the preparation of the crackers may have contributed to it.

“Every production has a standard procedure, and since the firecracker production is a high-risk activity, it should be monitored and conducted in a stable environment and under trained eyes,” the Home Minister stresses.

Nevertheless, experts say that since the industry thrives in the North Coastal districts of Andhra Pradesh, both legally and illegally, licensing, safety, and training protocols must be focused on.

They also stress on the need for providing a conducive work atmosphere, to avoid such accidents.

Meanwhile, the kin of S. Srinu, 36, a worker from the same village who survived the blast with severe burn injuries and a spinal injury stare at a crisis. Srinu wanted to give his two daughters, aged 8 and 5, a good life and education, according to his brother, S. Durga Prasad.

Prasad says, “My brother told me that there was a lot of pressure on them to meet the targets.”

“The pay is meagre— only between ₹300 and ₹500 a day. All this risk to earn a few extra rupees, to get a chance at a better life. Is it worth it?” he wonders as he watches his two nieces mourning.