The Gërdec Explosion
The Day Everything Changed
It was a Saturday, almost midday, in March 2008. I was home in Tirana and thinking about taking my children to the sea for a few hours. I was waiting in the coffee bar downstairs when suddenly the glasses on the tables shook. A shockwave exploded across the land and the waiter looked at me in horror. People came out into the street, shattered glass covered the floor, and you could see it on their faces, something big had torn itself open ten kilometers away. I started the car, called Rudina and told her to stay inside and keep the children close. Nobody knew anything yet, so I drove toward the smoke.
Later we learned what it was. In the village of Gërdec, at a former military base that had been leased to a private company for demilitarization, workers were breaking down stockpiles of small and large caliber rounds. A mistake on the line started a chain reaction. Propellant burned like a furnace, stacks of ammunition cooked off together, and the whole place went up. The blast was so strong it broke windows at the airport, stopped flights, and was heard far from Tirana. What should have been a controlled industrial process turned into a disaster.
Cars were stopped on the highway with all their windows broken, people were standing next to their doors holding their ears, bleeding, shouting and crying. I left the car where the road ended and walked, still hearing the crack and pop of ammunition cooking off in the heat. A minister arrived with his bodyguards and tried to walk closer to the explosion, I told him to stay back, he looked at me and I said, this is not your job, let us do it.
They told us people were trapped in a bunker under a block of concrete. I went around the back through the hills and found a trench with a woman and a man burned black and alive. The man stared at me and could not speak, the woman cried, and I called for a rescue team with stretchers. We carried them out while the ground breathed heat and smoke like an oven. In the evening, we found a body burned to a shape that did not look like a man. We learned he had been a friend from the army who had taken a job there after retirement. The earth was ripped open, the grass burned in stripes, shells lay in piles like potatoes, ready to explode. The noise did not stop until late into the night.
When Ammunition Became the Enemy
Shrapnel rained into the surrounding villages, and thousands of shells were blown out across fields and gardens, many of them still live. People were cut by fragments and by glass, roofs fell in, doors were torn from hinges, and later we counted the damage in hard numbers. 26 people died and more than three hundred were injured. In total 2,306 buildings were damaged or destroyed, with 318 houses gone completely and hundreds more left cracked and roofless. Four thousand residents were moved out and the area was declared a disaster zone. Gërdec was the worst of it, but it was not alone. Across the country there were many ammunition depots and tunnels that had been placed too close to towns, some already damaged by fire or by bad storage, all of them waiting for one spark. That day forced everyone to understand what poor stockpile management can do.
I spent weeks on that ground, moving people, moving ammunition, stopping politicians from walking where they should not. Reporters called and I told them I had no time to talk. What I carry is the weight of one burned man’s stare, and the sound under my feet when you step on soil that has been cooked by propellant and flame. That day changed the way our country talks about ammunition and safety. It took lives to teach it.
Gërdec forced us to confront what had been ignored.
What followed was a new mission.
Continue to Chapter 9 — Geneva, PSSM, A New Mission.
