The Herborn disaster - When a tanker truck set fire to a small town in Hesse
It is a warm summer evening in Herborn, Hesse, when disaster strikes on July 7, 1987. The picturesque timbered town by the Dill river is still bustling with activity. Many people are sitting in the ice cream parlor, when around 9 pm a tanker truck veers from a right-hand turn and crashes into the building.
In a Hessian Broadcasting documentary, an eyewitness recalls the scene, as he and his friends were sitting in the ice cream shop: "There was a huge bang, everything was full of glass shards and the entire ice cream parlor was immediately filled with liquid." The liquid – it was 34,000 liters of diesel and gasoline that spread everywhere. A young man and his two friends manage to escape through a window into the restrooms. They survive, but severely injured.
Entire Streets in Herborn on Fire
The driver of the tanker truck also manages to escape from the overturned vehicle before the devastating explosion occurs. Within seconds, an entire quarter is engulfed in flames, with some people trapped in their burning houses. The flames and the pressure wave of the explosion reduce the entire street to rubble and ashes, nine buildings collapse.
Suddenly, the scene resembles a battlefield: Injured people lie on the street, others frantically try to escape the fire and flying debris.
More than 500 firefighters are deployed in the following hours and days. The rescue efforts are slow. New fires keep breaking out. The rescue teams also have to use heavy equipment to move the debris in search of missing persons. Dogs are also used.
Herborn Disaster Claims Six Lives
The gasoline also seeps into the sewage system, creating a highly explosive gas mixture. Explosions in the sewage network send manhole covers flying up to 700 meters away, and burning fuel spreads on the nearby Dill river.
The Herborn disaster claims six lives, almost 40 are injured. It could have been prevented. For the truck driver had safety concerns and would not release the truck for the journey from Koblenz to a gas station in the Sauerland. But the freight company decided otherwise.
Herborn is located at the end of a nine-kilometer long steep slope, the so-called Westerwaldstraße. Just before the driver wants to get on the autobahn, the brakes fail and the transmission locks up. At 8:43 pm, the heavy truck crashes into the ice cream parlor.
The Landgericht Limburg sentences the driver to three years in prison three years later for negligent manslaughter, negligent bodily harm, negligent arson, and negligent causing an explosion. The junior manager of the Cologne freight company receives a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence.
To prevent similar accidents, the city sets up an emergency lane next to the steep Westerwaldstraße in 1989. But in 1992, a truck loaded with bricks drives onto the emergency lane and crashes directly into the city center, injuring three people. Later, the city builds a one-meter high concrete barrier to effectively stop trucks whose brakes fail on the steep slope.
The memorial for the Herborn tank truck catastrophe is located approximately 140 kilometers away from the site of the accident. The burnt and rusted wreck of the trailer is intended to make visitors of the German Occupational Safety Exhibition (DASA) in Dortmund aware of the risks of technology in a compelling way and to urge them towards responsible handling.
Look at the video above: In a business of a multi-family house in Düsseldorf, there is a catastrophic explosion. Three people die, and several others sustain life-threatening injuries. The cause of the explosion is still unclear.
- The headlines of the top news the following day in Germany heavily featured the explosion in Herborn, a town in Hesse, where an ice cream parlor was severely damaged by a tanker truck crashing into it.
- The Hessian Broadcasting documented eyewitness accounts of the incident, describing a massive explosion that filled the ice cream parlor with shards and liquid, which turned out to be 34,000 liters of diesel and gasoline.
- Despite the tragic situation, local officials and emergency services, including more than 500 firefighters, worked tirelessly to save lives and extinguish the fires that continued to spread throughout the affected area in Herborn.
- Investigations later revealed that the tanker truck, en route from Koblenz to a gas station in the Sauerland, had brake and transmission issues, leading to the catastrophic explosion in the ice cream parlor on Westerwaldstraße in Herborn.
