Ghislenghien ( nl, Gellingen; pcd, Guilinguin) is a small town of

Wallonia Wallonia (; french: Wallonie ), or ; nl, Wallonië ; wa, Waloneye or officially the Walloon Region (french: link=no, Région wallonne),; nl, link=no, Waals gewest; wa, link=no, Redjon walone is one of the three regions of Belgium—alo ...

and a district of the municipality of

Ath Ath (; nl, Aat, ; pcd, Ât; wa, Ate) is a city and municipality of Wallonia located in the province of Hainaut, Belgium. The municipality consists of the following districts: Arbre, Ath, Bouvignies, Ghislenghien, Gibecq, Houtaing, ...

, located in the

province of Hainaut Hainaut (, also , , ; nl, Henegouwen ; wa, Hinnot; pcd, Hénau), historically also known as Heynowes in English, is a province of Wallonia and Belgium. To its south lies the French department of Nord, while within Belgium it borders (clock ...

Belgium Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to th ...

. It has about 3000 inhabitants.

Gas explosion

On July 30, 2004 a high-pressure natural gas

pipeline Pipeline may refer to: Electronics, computers and computing * Pipeline (computing), a chain of data-processing stages or a CPU optimization found on ** Instruction pipelining, a technique for implementing instruction-level parallelism within a s ...

operated at a pressure of 70 bar ruptured following recent third party damage. Twenty-four people died as a result and 150 survivors were hospitalised, most with severe burns. It is thought that damage to the pipeline occurred during the final stages of a car park construction project. Notice of the work had been given to the pipeline operator,

Fluxys Fluxys is a Belgium-based company, mainly acting as a natural gas transmission system operator. In 2004, it employed around 850 people and its infrastructure comprised about of pipelines and a terminal in Zeebrugge, Belgium. The company is lis ...

, and one of their operatives had regularly attended the site through the course of the project. Damage to the pipeline probably occurred as a mechanical soil stabiliser was driven over it or near by. This resulted in several evenly spaced (but not full depth) gouges in the steel wall of the pipeline. Two weeks after the completion of the car park gas pressure was increased in the pipeline, which then ruptured with the fault centred on a 350 mm long gouge. Other contributing factors to the accident may have been a reduced cover over the pipeline as a result of levelling, the way information was passed down the sub-contracting chain to workers and the frequency and adequacy of supervision by the pipeline operator at the site.

References

Ath Former municipalities of Hainaut (province) Man-made disasters in Belgium Pipeline accidents 2004 in Belgium 2004 industrial disasters 2004 disasters in Belgium {{Hainaut-geo-stub