We live a good 5 miles from the Buncefield Explosion and were oblivious until we turned on the radio this morning. However, one of my flickr contacts lives a little further away was woken up in time to take some amazing dawn shots, see also the Buncefield Fuel Depot Explosion Pool and my small set of geotagged photos.
Technorati Tags: Buncefield, flickr, news
I heard the explosion and I am about 35 miles away, as the crow flies. It made me jump up in bed and go downstairs to check that my son hadn’t fallen off his bunk and going back to bed perplexed when I found no explanation for the sound that I was convinced had come from inside the house. When I heard about the Buncefield incident I have to admit that I found the story that it is an accident difficult to credit. How do they know? Anyway, there are many such facilities worldwide, and if they are prone to accident you would expect to hear about these more often yet nothing on this scale has happened that I can recall. Google meanwhile returns 243,000 hits for “fuel depot explosion” and 646,000 for “fuel depot attack”. Nonetheless, fuel depots are not that easy to blow up, either accidentally or on purpose. In Israel in 2003, a bomb went off at the country’s biggest depot, near Tel Aviv, which caused a fire that was put out before much damage was caused.
2.4 on the Richter scale - you must be a heavy sleeper. George S in Chesham said it shook the windows!