Ten workers are dead and four more are missing after an explosion ripped through one of Turkey’s biggest steel plants on Monday, in the country’s worst industrial accident in months.
The blast struck the HABAS iron and steel plant in Aliağa, a port district in the western province of Izmir, at around noon local time. A huge fire followed, and a column of smoke rose over the complex that could be seen for miles. Emergency crews were still picking through the wreckage on Monday evening, searching for the four workers believed to be trapped beneath the rubble.
The death toll climbed through the day. Izmir’s governor’s office first reported three dead, 10 missing and 14 injured. By the afternoon, Governor Süleyman Elban confirmed in a televised update that 10 people had been killed and 15 injured, at least two of them in serious condition. Four workers remained unaccounted for.
A crane fell into a furnace full of molten steel
According to the governor’s office, the first findings point to a single catastrophic failure: an overhead crane snapped and fell into an electric arc furnace while liquid steel was being cast. An electric arc furnace melts scrap steel with enormous electric currents, at temperatures above 1,600 degrees Celsius. Anything dropped into that vessel — let alone a crane — would trigger a violent explosion of steam, gas and molten metal.
People nearby felt it before they saw it. “The ground shook. It was very intense,” witness Nuri Ali Ulker told the state-run Anadolu news agency. Another witness, Deniz Ulker, said the blast “felt like the earth’s crust was shifting beneath us. I thought it was an earthquake.”
Broadcaster NTV showed images of a large fire burning inside the facility. Firefighters fought the blaze while rescue teams searched for survivors. “Our injured compatriots have been taken to hospitals and their health is being closely monitored,” Interior Minister Mustafa Ciftci said on social media.
Izmir’s mayor, Cemil Tugay, warned that the final toll would only be known once the debris is cleared — a grim acknowledgement that the four missing workers may not be found alive.
An investigation is under way — and the plant’s record is already under scrutiny
Justice Minister Akın Gürlek said the chief prosecutor’s office in nearby Menemen had opened an investigation and assigned four prosecutors, who are examining the site with a panel of experts. HABAS said the accident happened during planned maintenance on one of its electric arc furnaces and that the causes were being examined together with the authorities.
But questions about the plant’s safety record were already being asked on Monday. The Health and Safety Labour Watch, a Turkish workers’ rights group, said two other workers had died in accidents at the same plant in the past two weeks, according to BBC Turkish. If confirmed, that would make Monday’s explosion the third fatal incident at the complex in under a fortnight.
HABAS, founded in 1987, is one of Turkey’s largest steel producers, with a capacity of 4.5 million tons a year. Turkey itself is one of the world’s top 10 steelmaking nations, and Aliağa — a sprawling industrial port north of Izmir — is at the heart of that industry. The district is also known for its shipbreaking yards, which have drawn criticism from environmental groups and calls for the yards to be struck from the European Union’s list of approved ship-recycling facilities.
Why this matters
Industrial disasters like this one rarely make global headlines, but they should. Steel is the skeleton of the modern world — in buildings, ships, cars and wind turbines — and Turkey is one of its biggest suppliers. When a plant of this size stops, the shock travels through supply chains. More importantly, the pattern here is familiar far beyond Turkey: a maintenance job, a piece of heavy equipment, a furnace running at white heat, and workers caught between them. The investigation will establish what failed on Monday. The harder question — whether the two earlier deaths at the same plant were treated as warnings — is the one the families of the dead will want answered. The explosion came on the same day world leaders gathered in Antalya, on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, for the COP31 climate talks, a reminder that the country’s industrial heartland and its climate diplomacy were in the news on the same afternoon, for very different reasons.
Rescue teams were continuing to search the wreckage on Monday night. The governor’s office said updates would follow as the missing workers are found. The toll was also a grim echo of another industrial disaster earlier on Monday, when a fire tore through an apartment tower in Taiyuan, China, killing 14 people.
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