Café: gone. Bridal shop: gone. ‘Help, help!’ it sounds, from the flat at Tarwekamp

A rocket has hit, Perry van der Gugten thinks. He sits up in his bed. The war has started, thinks Simona Garattini, a few apartments away. Fireworks, thinks Peter Jansen. The windows shake, he hears wood splintering. One bang, some say even two. A scream. A car behind the apartment that suddenly catches fire. Another car driving away quickly. And then the devastation.

That is what local residents experienced on Saturday morning around a quarter past six when five homes were blown away at the Tarwekamp in The Hague. When Jansen jumps out of bed, puts on some pants and looks out the window, he sees high flames in the apartment building across the street. He runs outside, together with the neighbor he meets on the stairs. They can hardly see anything due to the thick, gray smoke. But they do hear voices. “Help, help!”

There is a wide gap in the apartments: my god, the café where visitors were there until at least two in the morning yesterday is gone. And the shop with Moroccan bridal fashion next to it, which has not been there that long, has also disappeared. The apartments above have fallen one floor.

Then the police cars drive into the street. Shortly afterwards the fire brigade.

The windows shake, apartment resident Peter Jansen hears wood splintering. Through the window he sees high flames on the other side

They immediately raise the alarm. Firefighters from Wateringen and Wassenaar are being called. Two trauma helicopters set course for The Hague. Lots of ambulances coming. Barely fifteen minutes after the first local residents called 112, the emergency services scaled up to a ‘very large fire’ and set up a command center. Half an hour after the explosion, a crisis team is set up – ‘grip 2’ in jargon.

It is still dark on Tarwekamp, ​​a street from the sixties with porch flats and small apartment buildings. But even in the darkness it is visible what is no longer there: two houses have completely disappeared from the street scene, just like the bridal shop below them. The roofs of three other houses have collapsed, floors have been swept away or only the facades are still slightly standing. In daylight, there appears to be rubble everywhere in the surrounding streets, and there are shards of glass everywhere.

Local residents stand outside in a group during the morning and watch the firefighters continuously extinguish the fire. I am in shock, says Simona Garattini (44).

It is a very average neighborhood, says Jansen. Families with children, singles, workers and people on benefits. Rental properties, owner-occupied properties. “A mix actually, we get along well with each other.”

Under the rubble

There are already numerous rescue workers around the building. Some wear a ‘triage set’, with red, yellow and green bracelets indicating which victims are in the worst condition. Emergency services remove four injured people from the buildings early in the morning, but fear that twenty more people may be buried under the rubble. But no one knows for sure: the fire must first be extinguished, and when it is extinguished it not only rains and blows, but the building also turns out to be too dangerous for sniffer dogs. “We do not know if and where there are people under the rubble,” a spokesperson told Omroep West at the end of the morning.

Local residents say they first saw a fire in a car behind the three-storey building

In the meantime, officers around the building are investigating the circumstances of the disaster. Local residents say they first saw a fire in a car behind the three-storey building and then heard a bang near the bridal shop. The police are particularly interested in the car that is said to have left the street shortly afterwards at high speed. It may indicate that it was not an accidental gas explosion, but deliberate.

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