Review series ‘The Fireworks Ramp’ of the NPO

The crackling sound of faltering electricity in the fireworks storage, the director who smokes a cigarette, the handyman who ignites a primitive gas heater in his caravan – the first episode of The fireworks disaster Is full of ominous omens.

The everyday scenes of a sunny Saturday in Enschede are also disaster pregnant: the daughter who goes to rooms for the first time, the father who is going to buy a gift for Mother’s Day on the bike, the local police officer who extinguishes a fire in a shed with a garden hose. All loaded because the viewer knows what will happen soon: the storage explodes, the workers’ district is being wiped out, the characters in whom the viewer has just destroyed, or will come out of the disaster. The TV series brings it in the movement.

This month it is 25 years ago that in Enschede a fireworks storage exploded in the middle of a residential area – the biggest explosion since the Second World War. Two hundred houses were destroyed, 948 people were injured, 23 people died. To commemorate this large disaster, the EO will bring the four -part drama series from Friday 2 May The fireworks disaster. The scenario is from Philip Delmaar and Edward Stelder. The director is Lourens Blok, known for the series Disaster flight,, ” New neighborsand the history series The story of the Netherlands.

Only the first episode is about the disaster day, the other three are about the aftermath. An important part of the series is about the legal settlement of the disaster. The director is convicted of storing too much and too heavy fireworks. A pyromaniac is convicted for arson. Case closed.

Plot

But not for the pleasant yet holding detective Hoekstra (Thomas Acda). Are the rapid convictions a judicial error, occurring from tunnel vision? he wonders. He discovers that the government wanted to quickly designate scapegoats to wipe its own street. What was no longer investigated: the permits are virtues? Who had been to storage that day? Is the government policy regarding fireworks storage? Hoekstra is here the lonely, heroic whistleblower who fights for the truth. Also the strict director, in the series a woman (Katrien van Beurden), does not leave it at that. But keeping her innovation uninhibited leads to her husband leaving her and that the neighborhood looks at her with the neck.

Such a conspiracy is of course nice for a drama series. But since Disaster flightI am wary of the series of the same director about the air disaster in the 1992. When a series is about such a sensitive historical event, you can’t just go along with all kinds of conspiracy theories. The viewer will hire them true, even if it is fiction.

But the findings of whistleblower Paul van Buitenen from 2019, on which the series is based, seem to cut wood, witness a reconstruction in De Groene Amsterdammer. Only, the series does not come to a good end to this. The abuses are not satisfactory, and rather clichéd. For example, Peter Blok plays the well -known incapable mayor who should say explanations as: “We are extinguishing fires here while they play the Zwarte Piet in The Hague.” The fact that the alleged fire founder was acquitted on appeal is strangely not in the series.

The time that applies to the conspiracy is especially a shame because the power of the series is elsewhere: the story of the victims and the relatives. For example, there is the daughter who has to take care of her unstable mother after the disaster. Her father is missing in the disaster. And the student who loses a newcomer in her student house. She only met her fleeting. Yet the girl’s death eats on her. Above all, it is about local police officer Paul (Joes Brauers), the man who helps victims, looking for a lost boy, comes out of the disaster fairly intact, but still ends up in a serious crisis two years later. You would like those characters to be deepened further.

Community officer

At the same time as the series, the EO posts four accompanying interviews with real survivors on YouTube, The fireworks disaster: Eyewitness. On May 13, the memorial day, Kefah Allush interviews even more relatives in the documentary The afternoon of 2000.

The testimonies on YouTube make almost more impression than the series, and show where scenario writers Philip Delmaar and Edward Stelder relied on. A cop, a firefighter and two children at the time speak. Twenty -five years later the disaster is still alive for them – some have to cry. Unfortunately, the makers do not dare to rely on the power of the testimonies and they wanted to make it even more exciting. They place the survivors in a backdrop of a fireworks storage. Cardboard boxes, a few loose arrows, flickering light must suggest a smoldering fire. Weird and inappropriate.

Nienke Westerhof talks about the start of the disaster when everyone went to the storage to look at the fire – the weather was nice, many thought it was a paper warehouse. The man of the Chinese restaurant sold beer to the spectators outside, “he did good business.” She tells how after the first explosion she fled with her father and saw her neighbor lying dead on the street. She was very much in a intoxication then to get it penetrated: “Your thoughts are like smoke around you.”

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