Skikda Province
From Phoenician Rusicade to French Philippeville to petrochemical port. The 2004 LNG explosion killed 29 and cost $940M—2nd worst gas incident since 1974.
Skikda has been reinvented repeatedly: Phoenician trading post (Rusicade, "Jug Cape"), Roman theatre city under Hadrian, French colonial port (Philippeville, 1838), and now Algeria's petrochemical heartland. Each era built on what came before and eventually obliterated it.
The French developed Philippeville as Constantine's port, connecting the two by rail. In 1878, a storm destroyed the harbor; they rebuilt it larger. By 1938, it was Algeria's fifth-largest port—but port ranking would soon become irrelevant. In 1970, a natural gas pipeline from Hassi R'Mel transformed everything. Petrochemical plants, LNG facilities, and oil refining followed. By the 2000s, Skikda was Algeria's third-largest commercial port, with offshore buoys servicing 320,000-ton supertankers.
The transformation carried risk. On January 19, 2004, an LNG explosion killed 29 people and caused $940 million in damage—the second-most destructive gas processing incident since 1974, eliminating 2% of global liquefaction capacity overnight. The port rebuilds. The pipelines still run. Skikda's lesson is that each reinvention creates new vulnerabilities: Roman theatre to colonial harbor to petrochemical node to explosion site. Geographic advantages persist; specific implementations fail.