President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a televised address that two of the injured were in critical condition and that investigators would examine how the disaster happened, whether there was any negligence and who was responsible.
The outline is brutally clear even if the full accounting is not. Euronews, citing officials, reported that the blast happened around midday local time during work on the boiler. The furnace was being used in the liquid steel casting process. Izmir mayor Cemil Tugay said rescue teams were still working to remove a collapsed platform, a reminder that industrial death tolls can arrive in stages, through fire first and then through wreckage.
One eyewitness said the explosion “felt like an earthquake,” which sounds like the kind of phrase people reach for when ordinary description gives up. Across a steelworks, that sensation also tells you something about the force involved when heavy equipment drops into a live industrial system.
What remains unsettled is the question that matters most after the immediate rescue effort: whether this was a catastrophic accident inside a dangerous business or a disaster sharpened by preventable failures. Erdogan said those circumstances would be established.
HABAS is a privately owned group and one of Turkey’s top steel producers. According to the company’s website, the plant was established in 1987 and can produce 4.5 million tons of steel annually. Scale like that tends to be described as industrial strength until something breaks and the same scale becomes part of the danger.
Workers’ groups said there was a long record of safety issues at HABAS. For now, that sits alongside the official investigation rather than replacing it.
Condolences also came from abroad, including EU president Ursula von der Leyen, while rescue crews in Aliaga continued clearing the collapsed structure around the workers who were caught in it.
Alex de Valletta 
Elena Vella 
Sophia Borg 