Think of the Ballymun flats complex, only bigger. Imagine it on a cold night with a good football match on the television. Now picture a jumbo jet loaded with ingredients for nerve gas smashing straight into the flats. That's what happened to Bijlmermeer.
I arrived two hours later, dumped my car on the hard shoulder of the motorway, and headed towards the flames. The El Al plane had scythed through the top five storeys of two buildings; about 40 flats took a direct hit. Then a huge fireball rolled through the complex, and apartment after apartment popped into flames.
Families which minutes before had been watching the Dutch equivalent of Match of the Day threw themselves off balconies to escape being burned. A giant cloud of choking white smoke engulfed the area.
Every firefighter and ambulance crew in Amsterdam scrambled to the scene. Dutch Navy helicopters beamed lights onto the rubble to help the rescue effort, the city's taxi drivers formed a relay run to get people to hospitals. But all were overwhelmed by the scale of what had occurred.
Many of the residents of Bijlmermeer I spoke to that night seemed to be strangely calm. A teenage boy said his friends lived in one of the blocks, and he was sure they were dead. A woman described calmly the awful explosion, and the incredible speed with which the fire had spread. A man told me, step by step, how he had seen people jump to their deaths from the seventh floor of building engulfed in flames. Another resident carrying a small radio did some quick calculations then nodded in agreement with the latest police estimate - about 200 people dead.
I phoned in the quotes from the apartment of another witness; she was quite concerned about whether I had reversed the charges to the newsdesk.
In fact, witnessing violent death on an unimaginable scale, it now seems to me that these people were finding a way not to lose their minds; they concentrated on small details so as not to have to cope with the whole of what had happened to them.
(Although the authorities were predicting hundreds of deaths, there were far fewer. Mercifully, some of the flats were unoccupied. Also, many immigrants living there had not stayed in to watch the football.)
At midnight, five and a half hours after the crash, the fire still blazed but was said to be "under control". Rescuers had retrieved the first dozen bodies, but said they were not in a position to identify them. In fact, they could only determine the sex of a few.
Meanwhile, El Al, and the Israeli authorities, had already begun denying that there was any unusual cargo on board the plane.
When I went back to Bijlmermeer last month, it appeared to have returned to normal - that is overcrowded, under-serviced, isolated and generally miserable. The stricken flats have been rebuilt but the grass beneath them is still waterlogged and unkempt.
Beside the memorial to those who died, two lads of around 14 took turns pushing one another in a stolen shopping trolley through the puddles and the dead leaves.
The monument was designed by local people, and its asymmetric use of colour, in tiny mosaics cast into concrete slabs, make it look more like a school project than a great work of the state. The names of 43 named victims are recorded in little white boxes, and there is a larger white box, left blank, for the unknown number of illegal and therefore unrecorded immigrants who died with them. Around the centre, there is all the paraphernalia of grief; small, stuffed, children's toys, and poems written to lost relatives.
But some people in Bijlmermeer have another reminder of what happened that night. About 850 are now complaining of physical and psychological illnesses they suspect were caused by the crash. Doctors speak of patients with cramps, respiratory problems, hair falling out, and unexplained pains.
Herma Sprey (45), was one of the first people to reach the scene. Now, she regrets her impulse to help others.
"I was standing in my kitchen looking out the window when the plane came down, about 500 metres away. I thought to myself `There are people I know in there' so I ran over immediately," she recalls.
She stayed as close to the scene as she could until 3 a.m., then later that morning went searching through the rubble for friends.
For some time afterwards, she thought she had arthritis, until she was diagnosed with encephalomyelitis, a disease that bloats the brain and spinal cord. She also complains that she cannot concentrate as she used to.
"The doctors can't say this was caused by the crash, because they still don't know what was on the plane," she says.
But after six years, this information is being dragged slowly from the authorities.
El Al's initial statement, carried around the world in news agency dispatches, came from the company's cargo manager at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport. The plane, he said, was carrying "a regular commercial load". Israel's foreign minister, Shimon Peres, sent his condolences and asked: "Who in Israel is not crying?"
El Al provided details about the bravery and experience of the pilot, Yitzhak Fuchs, who struggled for nine minutes before finally telling air traffic control the plane was "going down". In Tel Aviv, the then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin said Israeli hearts were with the victims.
What they could have mentioned, but didn't, was the kerosene, the asbestos, and the 220 kilos of dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP), a key component in the manufacture of sarin nerve gas which was on board.
Neither was there any discussion of what had happened to the large amount of depleted uranium used for ballast in all of such earlier-model jumbo jets.
All of these substances, along with about 20 kilos of something mysterious the Israeli authorities will not discuss, formed part of the fireball and its cloud of smoke and dust on that night in Bijlmermeer.
One man who suspected from the beginning there was something fishy about the plane was Louis Bertholet. By coincidence, his son had taken a snapshot of the jet earlier that day at Schiphol airport. In the photograph the third engine of the plane appears to be askew, but this possibility was immediately ruled out by the authorities.
Bertholet began to dig deeper, asking more questions - about what was on board the plane and why - but got few answers. He formed a research and pressure group, the Onderzoeksgroep Vliegramp Bijlmermeer, to try to force more information into the open.
"We have irrevocably learnt that in addition to the cocktail of toxic chemicals that came free during the disaster, many particles of depleted uranium must also have spread widely," he says. "After our research of soil and dust samples taken from the crash site, we have proven the presence of a number of very suspicious heavy metals - uranium, zirconium and lanthanum."
In the Dutch parliament, one MP, Rob van Gijzel, kept up a barrage of questions to the administration. Eventually, in April of this year, the government agreed to set up an inquiry.
The Israeli government, however, was still trying to convince the world that there was nothing unusual about the jet.
"There were no dangerous goods, no dangerous material on that plane," said the country's transport minister, Shaul Yahalom. "Israel has nothing to hide as far as the cargo of that plane is concerned."
His comments, on April 22nd, came two months after a committee of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, expressed its own concerns about the crash. The MPs pointed out that of the 390 kilos of depleted uranium used as ballast on the jumbo jet, very little had been recovered after the crash and fires.
They also demanded that El Al immediately remove any depleted uranium still being used as ballast in its jumbos, and replace it with less toxic tungsten "in order to avoid a future disaster". But El Al said it was up to Boeing, which had used the substance in its jets until 1981, to authorise the switch.
In October, the Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad printed a copy of a leaked freight document from the plane on its front page. It showed that El Al was shipping enough DMMP to make 270 kilos of sarin nerve gas, sold to the Israeli Institute for Biological Research by Solkatronic Chemicals Inc. of Allentown, Pennsylvania. In fact, the paper said, the plane was carrying three of the four main ingredients for the deadly nerve gas.
A spokesman for the company, Steve Morth, said the Israeli authorities had said the chemical would be used to test absorption filters.
At the Dutch Ministry of Transport last month, spokeswoman Judith Sepmeyer cast a jaundiced eye on the story, saying that all of the information had already been released and no one had noticed it.
She said experts believe the ingredients for sarin, such as DMMP, were on their own harmless: "The scientists say you could put two teaspoons in your tea and you would be fine."
But she also admitted that some 20 tonnes of material was still unaccounted for on one of the three cargo bills.
The public inquiry is now gearing up for its first witnesses later this month. Its spokesman, Henk Mulders, says its main purpose is "to establish for once and for all what really happened, and learn from it for the future."
There are, however, signs that some in the Netherlands are becoming bored with the whole affair.
Outside of Bijlmermeer, several people warned me that some victims were "taking advantage" of the situation, exaggerating or even inventing their claims in the hope of a big payoff.
One Amsterdam resident began by saying how awful the crash was, paused, then added that I should understand that Bijlmermeer was populated mainly by foreign scroungers here to sap the Dutch welfare system.
"They could crash another 10 planes there," he mused. "Then I would be happy."
Others, however, are determined to get to the bottom of what went on, especially some of the stranger aspects of the rescue operation.
For example, Vincent Dekker, a journalist with Trouw newspaper, has taken statements from dozens of Amsterdam police officers, many of whom mention being "helped out" in the chaos of the night itself by a crew of rescue experts from Paris. As France never sent such a crew, Dekker wants to know exactly who were these people, and what did they do.
There are other jarring details: How did 12 hours of videotape of the rescue operation come to be erased and shredded? And what happened to the cockpit voice recorder picked up and stored by firemen but now vanished?
Bob van der Goen, the lawyer for 85 of those who suffered loss or illness, wants to know why the Dutch Ministry of Health is reluctant to assemble a specialist team of doctors to examine his patients collectively. For the moment, he says, the ministry would rather rely on the dozens of family doctors involved, few of whom have any experience with radioactive or chemical disorders.
The campaigner, Bertholet, remains a beacon of hope - some would say naivety - in a sea of cynicism: "We have a long way to go, but we shall not lose courage. I have the impression that the men who work on this problem are trustworthy and incorruptible."