A catastrophic industrial incident unfolded on Monday at Turkey’s prominent Habas iron and steel facility in the Aliaga district, a key port and leading shipbreaking hub on the outskirts of western Turkey’s port city Izmir, leaving at least 16 people confirmed dead and 13 more wounded, according to official statements. All fatalities and injured parties are confirmed to be on-site factory workers.
The sequence of events began shortly after midday local time, when a crane transporting a replacement boiler suffered a catastrophic structural failure and collapsed, sending heavy materials plummeting into a high-temperature furnace below, per Izmir Governor Süleyman Elban. The resulting force of the explosion was so powerful that it shook the surrounding residential and industrial areas, leading multiple eyewitnesses to initially mistake the tremor for a major earthquake. Seconds after the detonation, a raging inferno ignited across sections of the plant, with footage from the scene capturing a massive plume of dark smoke towering thousands of feet into the sky, as emergency teams rushed to contain the blaze and launch search and rescue missions.
Habas, one of Turkey’s top domestic steel producers, noted in an official statement that the accident took place during routine scheduled maintenance work on one of the facility’s electric arc furnaces, and that the company was fully cooperating with all ongoing official probes into the root causes of the disaster. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan addressed the public following a weekly cabinet meeting on Monday, confirming the rising death toll, noting that two of the 13 injured workers are in critical condition, and emphasizing that search and rescue crews are still working around the clock to locate additional people believed to be trapped under piles of rubble at the blast site. Local media reports, cited by BBC Turkish service, confirm that at least five individuals have been arrested in connection with the incident as part of the preliminary investigation.
Independent labor advocacy group the Turkish Health and Safety Labor Watch highlighted that the tragedy underscores a long-standing, systemic crisis of unaddressed workplace safety violations across Turkey’s heavy industrial sectors, where preventable accidents continue to claim hundreds of lives every year despite repeated calls for stricter regulatory enforcement.
Turkey steel factory blast kills at least 16 people
