This is a transcript of one of my podcast episodes on Belgian history, this happened 50 years ago and cost the lives of 300 people. If you like my first post here in Steemit, please let me know.
In the 1960s there was a department store, more like a big shopping mall from one brand of retail shops in Brussels. This was called in french “L’Innovation” supermarket. The origins of this brand can be found all the way back in 1845 by a family called Thiery. The setup was to have quality goods at a reasonable price. It was named “Au bon Marché” at first, before it was changed into a more upper middle class quality store.
It was quite an attraction since there weren’t many big supermarkets at the time that sold anything from clothes, perfume, kitchen appliances, toys it even had a self-service restaurant and it even housed a hair salon.
It was visited by people from all over the country, part as a shopping mall, but also as a tourist attraction of some sorts. It was popular, because of the size and the big-city feeling it emitted.
The “innovation” or “Inno” as it was called in short, was therefore known throughout Belgium as the main place to be for shopping.
You can imagine the shock when on a certain day, disaster struck at this place.
The supermarket itself was opened in 1897 at the Nieuwstraat 123 , and got an overhaul for the main building in 1902 by none other than Victor Horta, in full art nouveau style. The concept was to have the different buildings that made up the supermarket come together through interconnecting them much like a maze, with one giant art-nouveau building front facing the street.
That unfortunate time in MAY 1967 the “Innovation” was holding an American-themed shopping week for its customers, as a publicity stunt. They mainly sold American style clothes and gadgets, stars and stripes flags hung at the entrance, they sold blue jeans and barbeque material. You get the idea.
On March 22, 1967, a monday 50 years ago almost to the day, disaster struck. The versions differ a bit, so I’ll first go with the most widely accepted version.
One of the saleswomen on the first floor saw flames in one of the storage rooms for the baby and children’s clothes departement. This was shortly after noon, around 1300 hours.
Someone set off the alarm but seen the timing, that fire alarm was mistaken for the noon lunch break bell for the employees. So it was missed as such by much of the people in the building. Also the fire department was called somewhere after 1300 hours and the source vary here, some say half past one.
Around that time an estimated 800 to 1000 people were inside the building.
The architectural layout of the different buildings that made up the store was as such, that they formed the mall around a central staircase around an inner square. This was capped with a dome to let light, and unfortunately air into the central staircase column. Much like a Roman Amphitheater as a layout, but with the central part made out of stairs and lifts. The back of the building, enclosed in between the back of other buildings, housed that self-service restaurant where most of the people were at the time since it was noon.
These people were soon trapped, as the fire fed itself very very rapidly through the air shafts behind the storage room where it was first seen. That way the fire spread to the upper floors and the central staircases, making them unusable to escape. The air draft throughout the building was an architectural feature to give the wooden floors in the store fresh air draft to keep it maintained.
There are however contradictions in what eye witnesses said.
Some said there were exploding canisters at the outdoor and camping section on the third floor, while one other witness said someone yelled “I five my life for Vietnam”. There were indeed protesters in the center of Brussels at that time, since it was 1967 and the anti-war protests raged on. Also problems in the kitchen of the restaurant were stated.
These theories were never proven however. The fact remains that they don’t know where exactly the fire started and what ignited it. The fire department, by the time they arrived some 5 minutes after the first call, started the impossible task. They needed to prevent the fire crossing over to other buildings in the center of Brussels, while trying to save as many people as possible trapped inside. They started to contain the fire and put up ladders against the windows.
But by that time, unfortunately, more and more people inside had no other way out than through the windows. Within 10 minutes the whole building was on fire and the black smoke made the central staircase impossible to use. Within 15 minutes the fire, fueled by the airstream inside the building and the gasses that had accumulated in the ‘false ceilings’ spread too fast to stop. The fire was very intense, but short. The whole housing block where the store was situated was burning. According to one of the last firebrigade member, the moving staircases were still running when they entered the building with the burned bodies of the people on it at the top, people were also found in the elevators, suffocated.
There are video fragments of this fire online, and you can see it’s really a giant inferno by that time, seen most of the building was well ventilated and made out of wooden floors, the fire department couldn’t do that much except for rescuing as many people and contain the fire.
Some people inside the Innovation started jumping out, even when firemen and bystanders yelled to stay put and wait for ladders to arrive. Most of them jumping anyway because of the heat and flames reaching them. Injuring themselves in the best case, while many died on impact to the ground or on cars parked below in the worst case.
Some of them were saved by the fire department or neighbouring civilians using blankets and ladders to get people from the first and second floors to safety. One man, for example, jumped from the third floor into some blankets and had only minor injuries.
A few people escaped by reaching the roof, climbing to safety to the roof of neighboring buildings, but most of the customers and employees were trapped in the smoke filled maze or by being in the back of the building. These people couldn’t reach the windows anymore and had no way out. We’re talking about dozens of people on every floor here and more than 100 (check) in the restaurant area. Trapped in the back, meant a horrible death.
The emergency exits that were installed in the shop either had nothing but a wall or a window behind them. They were purely there for decoration, to give people the impression the building had safety exits. There was no sprinkler system and the maze-like setup of this building of course didn’t help once panicking people started to look for a way out.
The small streets around the store were filled with parked cars, what also made the firefighting a lot more difficult.
The fire raged on, even while the firemen were trying to get it under control, soon the center part of the building collapsed around half past one, crushing the people trapped inside, if they weren’t already burned to death or suffocated by then.
The rest of the building burned up and most people died in the corridors. Rescue workers later found small totally burned bodies that were put into plastic bags and separated in a the emergency center. Needless to say that the one picture I saw of the many many plastic bags that were laid out later for investigation and identification, was gruesome.
In total 323 people died that day, and 150 wounded. And that’s a sad record for store fires in Europe that stands until today. And let’s hope there’s never a disaster topping that casualty rate.
I must also state that it’s not entirely sure exactly how many people died, this is the official estimate.
The Innovation company still exist, and is now called “Galleria Inno”, they have many shopping centers all over the world, including one at the exact same spot in Brussels where this disaster took place. You can find the current new building at the Rue Neuve / Nieuwstraat nr. 123 in Brussels, near the Rozenstraat. It has a large parking space and several shops as well as the main Inno supermarket.
The news reporting about this disaster was also very interesting, as it was a time were live coverage wasn’t that easy as it is now. No one had cell phones obviously, but it’s hard to imagine how much work was put into giving people an extra news programme to inform them the very same day and get the newspapers out on time with all the latest on this disaster. The original footage, from Belgian but also from abroad like the BBC, is very very sensational and accompanied with extremely dramatic music. It’s very hard to watch, that many years later, to hear the announcers make the wording so harsh and dramatic. I’ll include some of the youtube links to such newsflashes from that time, so you can see for yourself how this news was brought in typical 60s style.
Also worth mentioning is the political reaction. Politicians used this event to show themselves visiting the site. Even while it was still burning. While the fire was still raging, our most famous prime minister ‘Paul Van den Boeynants’ was showed on television, onlooking the carnage from a rooftop nearby, casually onlooking the carnage hands on his hips and resting one foot on the borderstone of the balcony. King Boudouin was also seen visiting the site shortly after, looking a lot more worried than the prime minister. The criticism on the politicians was high, seen there was a lack of regulation and mechanisms to check on the public safety at the time and an impression that they were trying to capitalise on this disaster.
The Innovation company itself wasn’t brought to justice for this disaster, maybe because that would have started a whole discussion back and forward about the official regulations and fire safety measures by the government. Like so many times, something has to go very very wrong before laws and regulations get an adjustment.
As a result of this disaster, the laws in Belgium regarding building and fire safety indeed were changed and even became rather strict. Buildings needed to be equipped with rèal escape routes, not mock ones, this needed be be checked by the local authorities. The changes also made sure there were enough fire extinguishers, sprinkler systems and corridors or ladders to escape from the building during an emergency. These escape routes needed to be clearly indicated and visible. These changes led also to an overhaul of much of the buildings, commercial and otherwise (like theaters, shopping malls, apartment buildings and offices). Even until today, the rules are such, that even smaller shops and companies need to make modifications in order to let everyone escape in a timely manner in case of an emergency.
There’s also a monument for the victims in Evere, near Brussels at the graveyard. With identical rectangular tombstones for all the people that lost their lives in this disaster.
This ends this black page of our history, and I can promise you there will be many to follow in the coming months, as I dive deeper in some tragedies our country went through.
If you like these stories from our history; please check out Random History of Belgium on iTunes or any podcast app for Android.
