| Explosions at the Oil Depot 1 | | Date Created: Dec 13, 2005, 10:13 AM |
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| Like Jason, I woke up Sunday morning just after 6. I woke quickly enough that I remember hearing a noise like distant thunder but without the sharpness and quickness of thunder. This was duller and more sustained. I'm told that some people experienced a rumbling and shaking preceding the noise, so perhaps the shaking woke me. I've been half-expecting some sort of terrorist attack on London; I wondered if this might have been it. So I was reassured when I went downstairs and turned on the telly to find the London-based BBC 1 with news reporters chattering away about normal sorts of news things. |
 Within a few minutes they were saying that they were getting initial reports about some explosion near St Albans. It wasn't till 15 or 20 minutes later that facts started coming in. In the middle of a phone interview with a woman who lived near by, she said "oh, there was just another explosion". We couldn't hear it on the TV, but I heard it outside 3 minutes later. It wouldn't have been loud enough to wake me, but it was audible. There was one more a few minutes later.
Hemel Hempstead is about 17 miles away from us, so those must have been deafeningly loud explosions! Walking my boy over the hill to his school this morning, the real cloud cover was high enough that we could clearly see the plume of dissipating smoke black against the light grey passing by our town to the west. My daughter goes to school in Watford and her school has been closed Monday and Tuesday. They must be almost halfway to Hemel from here, and have students a lot closer to the area.
How much worse it could have been! If it had been a weekday and the surrounding buildings had been filled with workers; if it had been a refinery with crude rather than a depot with fuel that had been specially blended and refined to burn more cleanly.... Anna said to me in the staff room yesterday, if any of a hundred other things that could have happened had happened, all the editorials would be saying "where was God?" I'm praying grateful prayers for the details of this one, for all the other disasters that haven't happened that might have, and also praying that we humans rethink and learn some lessons about fuel consumption and safety and stuff. |
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