The morning smelled of wet earth and diesel. In Gërdec, a village cradled by hills, the sound was first a deep, metallic cough. Then the world turned white. The shockwave shattered windows in Tirana, 15 kilometers away. A fireball, fed by 1,000 tons of old artillery shells, mortar rounds, and propellant charges, rose into the sky. It was not an attack. It was an industry.
Here, in a cluster of warehouses that was once a Cold War ammunition depot, a private company had been contracted to dismantle Albania’s vast stockpiles of obsolete Soviet-era shells. The work was hands-on, perilous, a way to make a living. Villagers, including women and teenagers, were paid a few dollars a day to unscrew fuses, pour out explosive powder, and scrape out brass for scrap metal. The operation was about profit, speed, and silence. Safety protocols were rumors.
When the first explosion ripped through the depot, it set off a chain reaction that lasted for hours. Houses within a kilometer were flattened. Cars were tossed like toys. The dead were largely workers and villagers, their bodies torn by the shrapnel they had been hired to handle. In the aftermath, the crater was vast enough to see from satellites. The tragedy illuminated a shadowy corner of post-conflict economics: the dangerous, often unregulated business of making old weapons disappear, where the poorest pay the price for a world’s desire to forget its arsenals.