I refer to the article entitled Fireworks Safety Proposals Still Awaited (November 17). Readers ought to know that the prototype fireworks factory intended to serve as a model for others was drawn up (free of professional charges, it has to be said) by a firm of architects for the 12th May Band and Social Club of Zebbug and the factory was eventually built accordingly on land donated by the Church.

This happened in the early 1980s.

The plan and the regulations it satisfied implied that the factory be enclosed within a compound that ought to also be encircled by a wire netting fence of a specific height. No more than a handful of fireworks factories have erected such a fence. Fewer than half of the "temporarily-licensed" factories satisfy the compound requirement with the relevant distances between the sections (that is, white powder room, rest room, store enclosure with blast walls, black powder room, etc). One such was the Gharghur factory, mentioned in the item in question. Yet, all irregular factories have been issued with "temporary licences to operate" year after year for decades.

If any new regulations, be they safety, be they any other, are published and enforced, more than half of these factories will have to be closed because they do not satisfy the criteria of space and distance. Which politician would dare do that with an election round the corner?

The comments by the expert, as reported, are extremely enlightening for those who want to see.

The room where the flash powder (mostly based on chlorate and per-chlorate compounds) is mixed, the white powder room, is intended to serve just as a working space. Only the material that is being used and/or worked ought to be kept there. Other unfinished material not being used ought to be stored away from this place, in the store room. That is how things should be according to existing regulations. When white powder rooms are blown apart and people caught inside are burned in a flash of an explosion lasting less than a second, it would mean that one of the safety measures of this room is being abused - a lot of explosive and highly-inflammable material, which should not be kept there, is in fact found inside.

This becomes obvious from the fact that, on explosion, or combustion, a temperature is generated which is high enough to do in just one second the work a cremation oven performs over a period of time. If a flash is strong enough to blow out a wall, however weak, and blow off a "light" ceiling, it would also be a give-away and an acceptance of the extent of abuse. Which regulation, existing or yet to be, would ever monitor such abuse and enforce its eradication?

We might eventually have some cosmetic, face-saving "new" regulations but what about their enforcement and implementation? This is all very reminiscent of the anthropology of politics: A lot of normative blah blah and little or no pragmatic substance. This is equivalent to political hypocrisy.

In the circle of fireworks enthusiasts, nobody ever knows what the cause of the accident was except dead victims, even if survivors have a clue, and this is all too well known. Detailed reports by experts are never made available to the public, assuming that such reports exist and that they are accurate and conclusive. Of course, once they remain unpublished one can never know!

So, in the meantime, explosions continue to happen. I'll quote from a poem I dedicated to a victim in 1977: "U b'daqshekk x'gara? Haduh bil-banda" (What does it matter anyway? The band played at his funeral!)