ABSTRACT
A century and a half after a disastrous gunpowder explosion had destroyed the centre of the Dutch city of Delft; a ship laden with black powder blew up in the centre of Leiden, killing 151 people, 50 of them schoolchildren, and injuring 2,000. Hundreds of houses were demolished. The Netherlands were ruled at the time by a brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, the French Emperor. A devastating explosion near Wilmington, Delaware, in 1857 led to a family firm's determined campaign over the next 150 years to raise safety in their company to its highest attainable level. In 2002 an explosion at a DuPont company's chemical works in Mississippi propelled debris into a neighbouring refinery, attracting investigations by the safety authorities. To help the war effort the dangerous process of manufacturing trinitrotoluene (TNT) had unwisely been established at an existing, disused chemical works in the highly populated area of Silvertown, east London.
