As soon as I heard about the source of ignition I thought about a similar catastrophe that happened in the USA about twenty years ago. This is terrible, but it is probably good to share it widely and in as many languages as possible. I am not sure of the best words, but it would be good to help this tragedy save others.
This has been happening since the invention of fire. People will cut corners and use cheaper flammable material where they shouldn't (e.g. Grenfell 2017) or some stupid with a flare gun will set it off inside (e.g. Montreux 1971).
Fire codes and building standards improve with time, but human stupidity is forever.
I wouldn't be optimistic: between the chances of some venue ignoring safety codes, and the chance of 1 in 250 people igniting some fireworks at a celebration… I'd expect this kind of stuff to keep repeating over and over.
I agree entirely, and that is basically the angle I am going for. I feel like spreading this around as much as possible will serve not as a deterrent, but as an informational event that perhaps folks will remember when they see the fire displays come out. We become complacent so easily tho.
TL;DR: An absolute moron fired some flares indoor, toward a highly-flammable ceiling, got 100 of his relatives killed in the ensuing fire.
Whoever it was may be a moron, but fire code is designed to protect us from morons. A moron with a flare gun should not be able to accidently murder 100 people. That's a failure on many levels.
Indeed. It's likely that insufficient fire code made this much worse, given what the article says.
Civil defense officials quoted by the Iraqi News Agency described the wedding hall’s exterior as decorated with a highly flammable type of “sandwich panel” cladding that is illegal in the country.
There's probably going to be a fire if someone fire flares indoor. But following the fire code can go a long way toward saving time, avoiding deaths. Multiple things went wrong to get such a disaster.
Latest information is often of the highest quality on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qaraqosh_wedding_fire
114 deaths reported so far.