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Ot - Big Blast At M1 Junction 8


Alibags

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All my birds and livestock are alive,VERYdistressed but alive.The fire is WORSE now (15.50hrs)than the initial aftermath,i got within 300 feet of the epicenter and the whole area is gone..I saw the mushroom cloud rise at 06.00hrs,about half a mile away from my house.

I know the area well but couldnt tell you what factories are still there or gone,such is the destructive power.Ive seen rivers of molten aluminum running down the road.Whole buildings have simply vanished or are now non-descript piles of twisted steel and metal.

I was on the scene within 20 minutes and a security guard from the site told me he saw a streak of light in the sky before it went BOOM.As i type the flames are 300+ feet high and at least 500 yards across !

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Strange thing is, although we are only five miles from the blast we didn't hear a thing, and talking to others in Berkhamsted, neither did they?

We live in front of Dunstable Downs and although we got a little bit of pressure/wind rush, there was no explosive noise. I only noticed it as I was awake and getting ready for work, a bit of a woosh of wind, the cat flap rattled and that was it ... Mrs M slept through it!! So it might be a geography thing? The Downs sheltered us from it, Berko sits in a valley, yes? I wonder if that sheltered you guys?

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It's been like a nuclear winter in North London, directly under the smoke trail. Drove about 5 miles north and it was a bright sunny day, but on driving back you could see the solid edge to the cloud and coudn't see the sun through it. The frost did not lift all day.

 

I love to plot a map of the areas that heard the explosion. The sound would have hit the inversion layer, bounced down, then reflected up, then down again.

 

So you should see a number of rings where the thing was heard, and regions between where there was nothing.

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smoke800.jpg

Well if I knew no better I would say this looks like a standard days sky in Manchester to me :unsure:

That sky looks a lot clearer than any time I've been to Manchester.

 

Where we live, in NE Hemel, just north of the B487, we've had glorious sunshine all day, just a massive pall of black smoke from a mile away. Now that it's got dark again there is a pulsating orange glowin the sky. Lucky for us all the smoke is being carried away from our direction, I certainly wouldn't like to be on the other side of it

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If there was anything to hear in Aylesbury, I slept through it. I did get a great view of the cloud as I went into London on the train though. A great bonfire's worth of black smoke rising 10,000ft or more before getting drawn-out into a long, broad bank. Impressive in a Hollywood way - Best wishes and good luck to anyone effected by it.

 

SP

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Well if I knew no better I would say this looks like a standard days sky in Manchester to me :laughing:

But it was bright sunshine behind me - ever seen that in Manchester?

To be honest, I have done many consultant jobs in the south east of England and the weather is very similar. Rainy Manchester is more a myth than fact.

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It's been like a nuclear winter in North London, directly under the smoke trail.

Not supprised- here's a bit of chatter from another group i belong to (cold war research group/Subterranea Britanica):

 

> Having been woken by the oil depot explosion (we're about 15 miles

> away) and hearing that folk half a mile away have had their front

> doors blown in, it occurs to me to ask if anyone with a blast

> calculator would want to hazard a guess as to the size of the

> explosion!

 

I don't have a blast calculator, but I do have a picture of one in

Beneath the City Streets! (1983 Granada edition, page 33.)

 

This shows a calculator set for a 12MT ground burst.

 

It shows the outer limit of Zone D damage (glass and tiles) at 21 miles

radius. I'm assuming that doors get blown in at about the same

overpressure (0.75 psi) as glass and tiles.

 

Thus the effects radius was about 1/42nd of a 12MT ground burst.

Assuming an inverse cubic law, the ratio of the yields would be 42 ^ 3.

This gives a yield for the Buncefield bang of about 0.16 kT.

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I was just getting ready for work when we heard and felt the blast. It woke Ollie Mum and it made our loft hatch slam. I thought it was thunder until Pieces_Of_Eight phoned to tell us that it was the fuel depot. I was so surprised that we could experience such noise and force as we live 12 miles away and the view from work at the airport was quite spectacular.

At the moment we have an aircraft which is having some major structural work being undertaken and it is being supported on jacks at numerous points. When the shock wave hit the hangar, the people working on that plane thought it had fell off the jacks and were running around checking all the lifting points. A few hearts skipped a beat here also. I've heard it measured 2.4 on the Richter scale although I can't confirm this as gospel.

Hope everybody near to the depot is not too badly effected and that casualties are slight and minimal.

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We have now lost our NTL Net Connection and TV, apparently customers in the HP1,HP2,HP3,HP4 and WD1 postcode areas will be experiencing degraded or total loss of service due to the Buncefield fire.

 

Our NTL connection in HP2 is still OK, for both CATV and internet broadband, although I can understand some ares getting cut off. The NTL offices etc. are on the Maylands Industrial Estate, so if any of their equipment goes down, then their engineers won't be able to get in to repair it.

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I live about 3-4 miles away in Apsley, and got woken up by the blast. I thought it was boxes falling over in the loft. My neighbour thought it was a train crash as our gardens back onto the railway.

 

I only found out it was the oil terminal when my father in law phoned to chek on us at 8 o'clock.

 

Now the wind's changed the smoke is floating over my house, I hope I don't get too much soot and fallout when they try smothering it with foam.

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Well after 48 hours down time of TV and Broadband, we seem to be back up. In case anyone is interested the problem is that one of the NTL boxes was located in the blast zone and it has partially melted, which is why only some people were having problems. An engineer is on site at the moment rewiring things so with any luck it should be returning to normal (whatever that is!)

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