The Low Moor Munitions Company was making picric acid, a yellow explosive vital to British shell production. The works were storing twice the amount the company was licensed for. When the fire took hold, the eighteen firefighters of the Bradford Fire Brigade went in to fight it, knowing what was inside. Six of them died when the drums went up. The blast killed twenty-eight workers from the plant, three workers from nearby Sharps Dyeworks, a policeman, a Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway fireman, and a member of the public who happened to be in the wrong place. Forty people in total. Sixty more were seriously injured, including the twelve firefighters who survived. The destruction reached for miles. Windows shattered across Bradford, houses collapsed at distance, and reports of injuries kept coming in from places the explosion should not, in any sane world, have reached.

Four days after the disaster, MPs in Parliament were still asking why the explosion had not been mentioned anywhere in government or press accounts. Dr Christopher Addison, director of the Ministry of Munitions, told them that bodies were still being located and the investigation was ongoing. The truth was that wartime reporting restrictions had buried the story. The Defence of the Realm Act forbade publishing details that might give comfort to the enemy, and a giant explosion at a British munitions plant qualified. The investigation, labelled Accident 379/1916, was conducted by Major Cooper-Key, an explosives inspector. It found the company had been storing drums of picric acid on bare stone floors instead of rubber loading platforms, that workers had not been wearing the special overboots designed to prevent sparks, and that drums were left uncovered in fair weather when they should always have been protected from dust and stray embers from the open coal fires that heated nearby buildings. The fire most likely started when iron picrate on the top of a drum ignited. A coroner's jury in Bradford Town Hall ruled the disaster an accident.

Britain in 1916 was a country looking for spies. A persistent rumour after the Low Moor blast held that a group of Belgian workers had been absent on the day of the explosion, which to suspicious minds suggested sabotage. The investigation took the question seriously enough to track down each Belgian and ask them to account for their movements. Every one of them did so to the inquiry's satisfaction. The fire had been ignited by carelessness, not a conspiracy. The disaster did, however, lead to changes. In 1919, twenty-nine new houses were built in First Street in Low Moor to rehouse some of the families whose homes had been destroyed. The works site became a landfill, and when it was later dug out, the digging crew found cellars from houses obliterated in the original blast, still where they had been left in 1916.

Superintendent Forbes of the Bradford Fire Brigade drove a fire engine away from the flames after the blast, collapsing afterwards from his injuries. He had saved colleagues, including a senior fire officer. King George V awarded him the Albert Medal at Buckingham Palace in March 1917. But Forbes emigrated to Australia in the 1920s and stopped attending memorial services, and his role in the disaster was largely forgotten until twenty-first-century historians pieced it together. A memorial to the six dead firemen was erected in Scholemoor Cemetery in Bradford in March 1924. After vandalism, serving firefighters raised £25,000 to move and refurbish it, and in 2003 it was relocated to the West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service headquarters at Birkenshaw. In 2019 the memorial was given Grade II listing. On the hundredth anniversary in 2016, the Low Moor History Group paid for a metal plaque commemorating all forty victims, and researched the names of those whose identities had been suppressed by wartime censorship a century before. They could finally be named, one hundred years too late.