Capitalist politicians have been trying to point the finger away from the real culprits--the bosses and their efforts to downsize the workforce, including job safety personnel, in their search for ever-greater profits--and instead blame everything from "foreign terrorists" to "uncontrollable urban sprawl" for the disaster.

The FCE-CFDT, one of the unions at AZF, said its representatives have had "difficulties" in "obtaining the maintenance of safety" at the plant, and alerted "the heads of industry and the public authorities to their responsibility to ensure maximum safety for their personnel and for the surrounding population, without systematically racing to compete or opting for profitability at all costs."

The explosion could be heard 30 miles away. The Global Physics Institute in Strasbourg, almost 620 miles distant, registered the event as equivalent to a 3.4 magnitude Richter-scale earthquake. Of the 29 dead, 22 were workers at AZF. Thirty-four of the injured were still listed as being in "extremely critical condition" one week later. The factory employed 470 workers. Around 170 were in the plant at the time of the explosion.  
 
Schools, apartments damaged
The blast shook the entire Toulouse area which, with close to1.5 million inhabitants, is France's fourth largest metropolitan area. The factory stands only about three miles from the city center, and breakage was evident throughout the downtown area. The first floor of the Marks and Spencer department store in central Toulouse was destroyed. Three hospitals, more than 60 schools, a university campus of 25,000 students, and a soccer stadium are classified as unusable.

As many as 10,000 low-income apartments in the nearby working-class neighborhoods suffered breakage. Damage to factories and other workplaces in the area has at least temporarily put tens of thousands of workers out of a job.

The factory is the largest producer of agricultural chemical products in France and the third largest in Europe. It is owned by Atofina, the chemical division of TotalFinaElf, the world's fourth largest petroleum company. The explosion took place in a storage silo where some 200 tons of ammonium nitrate, used to make fertilizer, were being stored.

Three days after the explosion the first official reports indicated that it was "99 percent certain" that the blast was of accidental origin. Some officials at the plant had previously hinted that foreign terrorists or a disgruntled worker were to blame.

AZF management have pointed to the supposedly stable characteristics of ammonium nitrate to imply that the explosion was deliberately set off. When soaked in diesel fuel and ignited at more than 200° C, the compound is used as the basic component of some 10 percent of all the explosives produced in France. Furthermore, if impurities are present in the mixture and there is sufficient humidity, the ammonium nitrate can change to a form that explodes at only 60° C.

The chemical was stored on the bare floor of a 70-year-old building because of impurities, making it unfit for sale. Police are looking for the wreckage of a diesel-powered bulldozer that workers claim was illegally used in the silo. Investigators now say they suspect that a diesel fuel leak may have helped trigger the explosion.

Some ecology-oriented groups, claiming that it is impossible to make chemical factories safe, have called them "ticking time bombs in our cities." A demonstration of 3,000 called for closing the AZF plant, as well as the SNPE plant next door that produces rocket fuel, a move that would put some 2,000 workers out of a job.

While some of those who demonstrated were workers from neighboring housing projects deeply concerned about the possibility of another explosion, the organizers of the action did not address the problem of safety conditions in the plant itself. A leader of one local ecology group told television reporters that the AZF plant should be closed for good because "we produce too much fertilizer in France already."

Union representatives said government officials have irresponsibly allowed "urban development around such industrial sites." They said they had recently "once again alerted the public authorities and management to this phenomenon and called for measures to be taken."

The FCE-CFDT said the "safety of employees and the population, respect for the environment, employment levels and employment conditions are interdependent issues" that cannot be addressed by "condemning [workers] to unemployment."

"The bosses at the plant in Toulouse showed a complete disregard for the lives of the workers at the plant and the inhabitants of the surrounding neighborhoods," said Philippe Guilpain, a 47-year-old maintenance mechanic and member of the CGT union at the Societe National Corse Mediteranee (SNCM) navigation company in Marseille. Guilpain has 10 years' experience working as a maintenance mechanic in refineries and chemical plants across France.

"I know that at plants where I've worked, safety definitely took a back seat to profitability," he said in an interview. "Normally you have to have a plant shutdown for maintenance every six months, but I've seen shutdowns delayed to meet production goals." He added that the bosses have "also attacked the workforce: in the plants around Marseille there are half as many workers as 10 years ago, but they're still producing just as much or more chemicals and gas."

Some reports on the accident point to the extensive use of temporary workers by the company at the Toulouse plant, questioning their training and capacities. Guilpain, who has been employed as a temporary worker, said, "I think they try to blame part of the workers to get us to point the finger at each other, when really it's the fault of the bosses and the government."

In the period before the explosion, the AZF plant in Toulouse produced as much with 470 workers as it did in the 1980s with more than 2,000 workers. Among the jobs cut by the bosses were a large number of the professional fire-fighting force, which is obligatory in any large plant. Instead, workers were trained to be "auxiliaries" and were expected to change clothes and rush to the scene in case of an incident. According to press reports, regular in-plant safety inspections have suffered as a result,.

The DRIRE, the government agency which inspects safety conditions at chemical sites, shuffled off its responsibility by saying it has only 40 inspectors to cover the 1,500 chemical factories in the area from Marseille to the Italian border, and only 16 inspectors to cover the 2,000 plants in the area around Toulouse. "We inspected the AZF plant in May but did not look at the storage silo. We only have time to check for toxic gases," one inspector told a television reporter.

Marc Kinzel works as a maintenance mechanic at SNCM in Marseille. Nat London works at the Renault auto parts plant at Choisy-le-Roi, near Paris. Both are members of the CGT union confederation.  
 
 
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