Aqaba’s Fluoride Plant Fire Fits a Longer Chemical Pattern

Civil Defense and Aqaba Police put out a fire at the aluminum fluoride factory in Aqaba’s industrial complex on July 7, 2026. The Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority said no one was hurt, cooling followed, and work in the southern zone restarted in stages.

Governor Ayman Al-Awaisha led the on-site response, and the back road to the port was closed while crews worked. The authority treated the night as proof that its emergency plan held. The same chemical strip had already seen a chlorine disaster at the port, acid fumes that put dozens in hospital, and, in September, an ammonia leak that cleared the southern docks.

A Fire in the Fluoride Warehouses

The blaze started in storage at the aluminum fluoride plant in the southern industrial zone, Nidal Al-Majali, a former ASEZA commissioner for tourism and environment, wrote on July 19, 2026. ASEZA’s own statement that evening named the same factory inside the industrial complex and thanked Public Security crews, the governorate, the authority’s teams, and safety officers from companies in the southern zone.

The swift handling of the incident came as a result of effective coordination between the various parties from the governorate, Public Security, ASEZA’s teams, and public safety officers at industrial companies in the southern zone, within the main emergency plan and the activation of approved protocols.

Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority, July 7, 2026 statement

That wording is the official record of the July 7 fire at the factory. It says the fire was fully contained, cooling was finished, workers were kept safe, and plants in the southern zone began to run again under the usual steps. It does not name the company, the fuel, or the cause. It does not say whether any process chemical left the building.

Al-Majali was more specific about where it burned. He described storage bays, not a reactor hall, at a chemical plant that sits in the middle of the southern zone. He also wrote that one firm in that strip has had repeated incidents, and that a restaurant spit fire had drawn more cameras than a warehouse blaze at one of the country’s more dangerous industrial sites.

The Plant Makes Flux Beside Acid and Ammonia

Jordan Phosphate Mines Company runs the fertilizer complex in Aqaba and lists aluminum fluoride among its products there. The company calls the site one of the largest phosphate fertilizer complexes in the Middle East. DAP, the main fertilizer, is rated at 3,000 metric tons a day. Aluminum fluoride is a smaller line, made from aluminum hydroxide and fluosilicic acid, a byproduct of phosphoric acid, and sold as a flux that lowers the melting point in primary aluminum work.

ASEZA did not name the owner in its fire statement. The product list for that complex is public. In 2025 the company published these totals for the Aqaba site.

THE 2025 OUTPUT AT THE AQABA COMPLEX

The 10,071 tonnes of aluminum fluoride sat beside more than a million tonnes of sulfuric acid and almost 300,000 tonnes of phosphoric acid. That is the map of what shares the ground with the warehouse that burned. Some neighbors store ammonia. Others handle acids. A green ammonia project has since leased a large plot in southern Aqaba for a commercial plant near the port, with design and environmental studies still under way and finance aimed at 2027.

Aluminum fluoride work uses fluorine compounds. The chemical that worries industrial hygienists in that family is hydrogen fluoride, a colorless gas or fuming liquid with a sharp smell. The U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health lists it as immediately dangerous at 30 ppm. Its recommended limit is 3 ppm over a shift, with a 15-minute ceiling of 6 ppm. The U.S. occupational standard is 3 ppm. NIOSH notes that 50 ppm may kill if breathed for 30 to 60 minutes, and that the gas attacks eyes, skin, and lungs and can cause pulmonary edema. It also reacts with metals, water, and steam, and it eats glass and concrete.

Al-Majali stressed that no official finding said HF left the plant during this fire, and that no one should claim a release before the technical inquiry is done. If that inquiry exists, he wrote, it should be published. ASEZA’s July 7 note is silent on the point.

Aqaba Has Run This Chemical Sequence Before

The July fire hurt nobody, on the authority’s figures. That is not the full Aqaba file. The port city is Jordan’s only seaport and a tourist strip on the Gulf of Aqaba, with a southern industrial belt packed with fertilizer, acid, and gas handling. The worst night in that file is still 2022.

THE CHEMICAL INCIDENTS ON THE STRIP

1. June 27, 2022: A chlorine container falls during loading at Aqaba port, killing 13 people and injuring more than 250.
2. October 15, 2025: Sulfuric acid fumes leak from an industrial plant; 43 people are hurt, six of them kept under watch, after a cloud of about 400 square metres.
3. April 6, 2026: Twelve people have breathing trouble in the southern industrial zone; Public Security says dust and industrial emissions, not a detected leak.
4. July 7, 2026: Fire in storage at the aluminum fluoride factory; ASEZA reports no injuries and a staged restart.
5. July 22, 2026: Civil Defense puts out a chemical fire in a factory yard in Aqaba; Public Security reports no injuries.
6. September 14, 2026: An ammonia leak during pump maintenance at the industrial complex injures 11 people and clears the southern port.
7. October 1, 2026: A limited fire at a liquefied-gas loading stand, and a fire on oil lines that feed the Aqaba refinery, are put out with no injuries reported.

A Loss Prevention Bulletin review of the 2022 port night records 13 fatalities and over 250 injuries after a lifting sling failed and a chlorine container ruptured on a ship. Jordan’s interior minister later said the tank weighed three times what the cable could hold, and that the required safety steps for that cargo were not in place. On July 16, 2023, a court gave five people tied to the port company three-year sentences and fined the firm 3,000 Jordanian dinars.

The July 7 fluoride fire is the date on that list with no ambulance run, if ASEZA is right. It is not the last date.

Why Did the Southern Port Empty in September?

On September 14, 2026, an ammonia leak during maintenance on a pump, or other old pressurised kit, hurt 11 people at the industrial complex. Nidal Al-Ouran, ASEZA’s commissioner for environment and public safety, said the leak came around midday, the dose was small, and homes were not hit. The work was being done for a Japanese firm he did not name. Some of the 11 were treated at the complex clinic. Others went to hospital with minor to moderate breathing trouble. Workers were pulled out under the zone’s emergency plan. The southern port was cleared as a precaution.

ASEZA chairman Shadi Ramzi Al-Majali, Governor Al-Awaisha, and Al-Ouran later visited the injured at Prince Hashem Military Hospital and the Islamic Hospital in Aqaba. The authority said it would look at the cause and at the safety steps used during the job. Crews took air readings before sending people back.

That is the event that traveled. The July warehouse fire stayed a local note. The ammonia leak emptied a working port and put names on hospital lists, so it moved on wires and on X. The louder public fight was never about fluoride smoke. It was about a pump that leaked ammonia in the same belt, and about a dock that had to be cleared because the plants sit next to the country’s only sea gate.

WHO THE JULY FIRE LEFT EXPOSED

• Complex crews: They work beside acid units, ammonia, and the fluoride line, and they are the first lungs on any leak.
• The southern port: The back road closed on July 7; the docks themselves were emptied on September 14.
• Neighbor plants: Acid and ammonia stores share the same ground, which is the cascade Al-Majali called the domino effect.
• The tourist city: Hotels, diving, and the gulf shore sit in the same governorate as the chemical belt, which is why a former tourism commissioner wrote the warning.

Al-Majali’s point was that each firm may meet its own rules while the zone as a whole stacks tanks closer together. He asked whether new ammonia tanks and other hazardous stores were being judged one project at a time, or against the load the whole southern zone already carries. He said he was not calling for a halt to investment. He was asking who signs the cumulative risk sheet, and whether the emergency kit can still keep up.

The Hazmat Station Opened Last May

Al-Majali gave the night’s other credit to a station he had pushed while in office. Interior Minister Mazen Al-Faraya opened the specialized Aqaba Civil Defense Center on May 29, 2025, with Public Security’s director, on Independence Day. The center is built to run fire, rescue, ambulance, water rescue, and hazardous-materials jobs from one southern site, with a short run time into the plants.

Jordan Phosphate Mines Company also opened a 10-bed emergency and first-aid post inside its industrial complex in 2025, staffed for trauma in that belt. Some of the people hurt in the September ammonia leak were treated at the complex clinic before others moved to hospital. The July fire, on ASEZA’s account, never needed that bed list.

In February 2026, months before the warehouse blaze, Al-Ouran opened talks on a draft Public Safety and Risk Reduction Regulation for the special economic zone. About 68 bodies from government, the military, and private firms sat in. Taghreed Al-Maaytah, who directs environmental protection at ASEZA, walked through duties for plants that handle hazardous chemicals, and through what happens when a site does not comply. The draft was already on the table when the fluoride storage caught fire.

Readiness is what ASEZA praised on July 7. Al-Majali’s reply was that readiness is not the same as taking risk out of the ground. The station can cut minutes. It cannot move a tank farm.

He Asked About the Fire After This One

Al-Majali wrote as a former tourism and environment commissioner, not as a safety engineer. His beat used to be the other Aqaba: reefs, hotels, the brand that sells the gulf. That is the stakeholder a “no injuries” line does not name. A toxic plume that missed workers could still hit the shore road, the port, or the rooms that pay the city’s other bill.

True success should not be measured solely by how quickly a fire is extinguished, but by our willingness to ask difficult questions before the next fire occurs.

Nidal Al-Majali, former ASEZA commissioner for tourism and environment, July 19, 2026

He asked whether the mix of hazardous plants in the southern zone had reached the point where the whole belt needs a fresh, independent load test. He asked whether more danger would still be added. He said people, not fate, pick factory sites, sign expansions, and place tanks, and that some of those tanks are old enough to have their own risk reports.

The next fire, in the sense he meant, did not wait long. On September 14 the southern port was emptied over ammonia that leaked from kit under maintenance. Eleven people went for breathing care. The July warehouse fire remains the night nobody was hurt. It is also the night that sits between a chlorine disaster and an ammonia evacuation, in a zone that is still being asked to take more gas.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is Aluminum Fluoride Used For?

It is a flux in primary aluminum, added so the bath melts at a lower temperature. At Aqaba it is made from aluminum hydroxide and fluosilicic acid, which itself is a side stream from phosphoric acid. In 2020 Jordan Chemicals Company, wholly owned by Jordan Phosphate Mines Company, signed with Alufluoride Limited of India to modernize the Aqaba line and to build a second plant at Al Shidiyeh in Maan, with each site then aimed at about 20,000 tonnes.

Did the July 2026 Aqaba Factory Fire Release Hydrogen Fluoride?

No official statement has said that it did. NIOSH also flags a delayed danger that would matter if a release were ever confirmed: skin contact with weaker HF can stay quiet for hours, then burn deep, because fluoride binds calcium in tissue and can disturb heart rhythm. That is why an inquiry that only counts flames is incomplete for this plant.

Who Produces Aluminum Fluoride at the Aqaba Complex?

Jordan Phosphate Mines Company lists the product among the output of its Aqaba Industrial Complex and posted 10,071 tonnes for 2025. ASEZA’s fire statement named the factory, not the shareholder register. Indian Potash Limited was the largest JPMC shareholder at about 27 percent in early 2026, with the Jordanian government at 25.7 percent.

What Did the 2022 Aqaba Chlorine Inquiry Find?

The interior minister said the lifting cable’s rating did not match the tank’s weight, a safety attendant was not on deck, and basic rules for that cargo were skipped. Five people linked to the Aqaba Company for Ports Operation and Management received three-year prison terms on July 16, 2023, and the company was fined 3,000 Jordanian dinars.

On September 14 the southern port was emptied over a pump that leaked ammonia during maintenance, and 11 people needed breathing care. The July warehouse fire is still the night the official count stayed at zero.