N. P. Johnsens Fyrværkerifabrik was not a small operation. It was Denmark's leading fireworks importer at the time, handling roughly a quarter of the national trade, and on that November afternoon the Seest site held around 800 tonnes of fireworks — 284 tonnes measured as net explosive mass, comfortably under the 300-tonne ceiling its licence allowed.

The first crew arrived expecting a container fire. That is exactly what it looked like: one forty-foot steel box burning hot but apparently contained, the kind of job a Danish brigade handles without drama. The blaze refused to go out. Water made no impression on it, the heat drove the firefighters back, and at 15:25 the container detonated. Over the next two hours the fire worked its way toward the main storage halls. At 17:45 those went up in three enormous explosions that were heard and felt for kilometres across the Kolding valley.

One man did not come back. Max Jørgensen, thirty-three years old, was killed in that first container explosion. He was a part-time firefighter — one of the deltidsbrandmænd who hold ordinary jobs and turn out when the pager goes — and he was the only person to die at Seest.

Seven other members of the rescue services were injured, along with seventeen local residents. Thirty-four rescuers, eight police officers and twenty-seven personnel from the Danish Emergency Management Agency were treated for smoke inhalation; in all, around eighty-five people were taken to hospital. Eight fire and rescue vehicles were destroyed where they stood. Jørgensen was posthumously awarded the Danish defence medal for those killed and wounded in service.

What kept the death toll at one was a decision made in the gap between the first explosion and the last. Police went street by street through Seest and cleared 760 households — roughly 2,000 people — out of the area nearest the factory. Families left with whatever was in their hands: keys, coats, children, a dog. From the ring roads and the fields beyond, some of them stood and watched the sky above their own neighbourhood fill with the coloured light of a fireworks display nobody wanted, rockets arcing over their rooftops in the flat grey light of a Danish November afternoon, the sound arriving late and far too loud.

When the storage halls went at 17:45, those streets were empty. It is the plainest possible measure of what an evacuation is worth.

Many of them came back to nothing. 355 houses were damaged, 176 of them badly enough that their owners could not move back in, and around 75 had to be demolished and rebuilt from the foundations. Across the wider area 2,107 buildings sustained damage of some kind — cracked walls, blown-in windows, roofs lifted off their joists. Two months afterwards the compensation bill was put at 750 million Danish kroner, on the order of 100 million euros.

The investigation ran for a year and a half. An early suspicion that the factory had been hoarding far more than its licence permitted did not survive scrutiny — the stock was within limits. An expert report published on 15 May 2006 concluded that no Danish authority had broken the law or failed in its duties. What destroyed Seest was two employees, a container, and a dropped crate.

Kolding Municipality bought up the ruined properties. Where the factory stood there is now housing and open green space, and the worst-hit streets were rebuilt rather than patched. Walk through Seest today and you would struggle to read the disaster in the buildings at all.

You can read it on a street sign. In November 2017, as new homes went up on the old factory ground, one of the new streets was named for Max Jørgensen — the part-time firefighter who answered a call about a burning container and did not come home. In a suburb that lost hundreds of houses and one life, the houses turned out to be the easier thing to replace.