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.
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.
