Belgians mourn gas blast victims

Belgian government offices across the country were flying their flags at half-staff yesterday as King Albert II led mourning for the dead a day after a spectacular explosion of a gas line killed at least 15 people and injured 120.

Authorities said there were another three people missing, including one police officer at the site where the explosion occurred early Friday morning, in an industrial area just outside the village of Ghislenghien, about 30 kilometres south of Brussels.

Some 50 people remained in serious condition, officials said. Many of the injured suffered severe burns and were being treated at special burn units in Belgium and in the nearby city of Lille, France and in Paris.

Officials said four burn victims were on life support in a coma at a military hospital in Neder-Over-Heembeek, a suburb of Brussels. Another two were fighting for their lives at an Antwerp hospital.

Meanwhile medical experts continued their work on identifying the dead at a morgue set up in a local school in Ath.

The mood was subdued in Ath and flags were flying at half-staff on the gray town hall as King Albert II, who cut short his vacation in Spain, arrived at the town's main square.

After greeting a silent crowd, the king went into the town hall to attend a meeting of rescue workers.

Albert also spent half an hour consoling families of victims behind closed doors. The king looked visibly shaken by the meeting as he left the town hall. "I can't smile today," the king told a bystander.

The king also spent half an hour at the blast site, at Ghislenghien, nine kilomeres north of Ath. Travelling with him were Interior Minister Patrick Dewael and Defence Minister Andre Flahaut.

Security at the site was tight, as investigators continued their work collecting evidence finding out the exact cause of the explosion.

Albert talked with firefighters and rescue workers at the industrial park, which now lay in ruins. He was expected to visit injured victims at a hospital in Ath later yesterday and visit the Ath volunteer fire department, which lost five firefighters in the blast.

Ahead of the king's arrival, a wedding went ahead as planned at the town hall, but guests were told not to throw confetti in respect for the dead.

Townspeople were laying flowers outside the fire station where the five dead volunteers were based.

Inside, many of their 52 colleagues sat in silent groups flipping through newspaper coverage of the disaster.

"We need to look at them again and again, it helps us," said firefighter Patrick Chevalier, 41. Chevalier arrived on the accident scene shortly after the explosion.

"It was the apocalypse, we couldn't see anything or anyone, and then we began to find the bodies scattered around the area, completely carbonised," he said. "One colleague we recognised straight away by his shoulder badge, but it wasn't possible to identify others."

Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt and several of his ministers visited the site late Friday.

"The accident constitutes for our country a national catastrophe, and the toll is a heavy one," Verhofstadt said. He ordered flags to be flown at half-staff and declared a national day of mourning when the victims are buried.

The firefighters were the first on the scene answering a report of a gas leak before the explosion. Construction workers alerted firefighters that they had damaged the underground gas line.

The thunderous blast was heard kilometres away and sent a towering wall of orange flame soaring into the sky in a series of mushrooming balls of fire.

The blast incinerated a swath of large buildings in the industrial park and hurled bodies more than 100 metres into nearby wheat fields.

The devastation resembled a war zone, with everything within a half-kilometre radius of the explosion melted or badly burned.

Belgian newspapers retold the horror and spectacle of the earth-shattering blast in their Saturday editions.

"The Hell – Ghislenghien," headlined daily Het Volk, while Le Soir and Le Libre both had full front page pictures of the fireball, which burned for hours, with the simple headline "Ghislenghien, 08:55" – evoking the time of the blast.

Gas distributor Fluxys said the pipeline runs from the Belgian port of Zeebrugge to France. The blast occurred about a half-hour after the leak was first reported.

Firefighter unions urged the government yesterday to come up with stricter rules to monitor gas lines as well as standard rules on how to handle leaks, especially if they happen at construction sites.