Reporting a comment

Please enter a brief reason why you think the comment should be deleted. Thanks for your help!

The comment you're reporting

Buncefield Oil Depot

I live in Hemel Hempstead, about three miles from the depot (the other side of town) & I was awake at just before 6am when the explosion happened. To be honest, I really thought a plane had crashed nearby - the noise & vibrations were immense & out of my window in the dark I could just see orange flames billowing into the sky, it looked nearer than the other side of town but when I rang my Dad the first thing he said was "That'll be the depot gone up then" &, obviously, he was right. (as usual :)) Looking at the fires raging into the sky I am sure everyone felt the same as me, that this was going to be an awful tragedy - that many, many people were going to wake up to a world that no longer held any meaning for them. Christmas... I couldn't get it out of my head ...it was so near to Christmas! The fires raged on, they got bigger, not smaller & there was obviously fuel of some sort burning as blobs of flame would seperate from each other in a liquid way, much like Mercury does if you smash a thermometer. It was scary, even as the news began to arrive on the BBC & we knew for sure it was the depot but, as time passed, it became clear that by some fluke of timing & sheer, incredible, wonderful, luck, no one had been killed... not even seriously hurt! The relief of that is hard to describe for, had it been the next day, or any other time of the day, any moment except that one on a Sunday morning & it would have been a very different story, God only knows how many people would have been killed, how many lives changed forever. As the days passed after the initial explosion we realised how true that statement was. The devastation was not limited to the depot, whole sections of the neighbouring industrial estate were destroyed, cars were burnt out, some lifted & thrown a great distance from where they had been parked. If it had been a normal business day then all of the buildings that lay in ruins would have been full of people - there would have been many, many more cars. The air in our town stayed thick for days & everywhere you looked it was smoky & dirty but, once we knew no'one had died or had any serious injuries, well, then the whole event became quite fascinating & it certainly produced some amazing photography both from the professionals &, rather wonderfully, from all sorts of local people. It is certainly something I will never forget & a moment in history that deserves recognition. You can read about the fire here http://tinyurl.com/k3rhq & see photos on Flickr tagged with Buncefield here http://tinyurl.com/osmxj