Anybody get woken up by the explosion in Hemel Hempstead?

Huge refinery explosion just after 6am, eyewitness reports saying they were woken by a massive explosion and flames are hundreds of feet high. Damage to houses etc, here’s a couple of pictures from a member on another forum:

Link to BBC page: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4517962.stm

bl**dy hell…thats massive…

reports off bbc say it was an accident…

Was watching BBC news earlier and they were saying it was an accident.

quote of the day from BBC news: Nearby resident " I heard the explosion and it blew the glass out the windows and can see lots of smoke" News presenter " so presumably your indoors with all the windows shut"

Curly

Looks like a volcano eruption :eek: bad for the people in the area. Fumes must be terrible.

I can still remember when I was seven and heard an explosion. I thought it came from my sisters room so I went in to check if her vaporizer blew up. (In the first half of the 20th century people put steam generating vaporizers in bedrooms at night if someone had a cold and was feeling stuffy.) I looked out the window and saw the horizon was a bit orange.

It seems the Exxon (then Esso) oil refinery in Elizabeth, New Jersey had blown up. I think it’s 50 miles away. That was 41 years ago and I still remember it.

I used to do work there at the Mobil depot installing computer systems.
As soon as they said Hertfordshire I knew which one it would be.

Woo, scary demon faces in the flames . . . . .

I feel much better now that I know I’m not the only one who noticed that :chuckle:

I did not want to post that incase people thought I was going insane (Though that happened many years ago;)).

Did you find the bagpuss as well … ?

/gets coat

Someone will probably claim it’s the face of Jesus appearing to chastize you for contributing to global warming. Though, Mt Nerogongo in Africa emits more CO2 than all of man’s activities combined. I wonder why nobody has sued the volcano. :cuckoo:

i saw Bagpuss, and a few other faces. But I’m really good at spotting something in nothing, its one of ther easons I am obsessed with taking pics of fire :smiley:

You have to read some of the witness reports on the BBC site. I agree that the blast would have been heard from a long way away but people are putting every little thing that happened last night down to this blast.

The funniest one I read was ‘I woke up this morning to find my lodger in bed with me. Fortunately my husband works nights…’ :confused: Ok so she does live in Hemel and they did say people were chucked about by the explosion.

Some people round our way claim to have heard something too! I didn’t!

On the plus side I’m working from home today instead of being in our office about 500-800m away from the fire? I hope my desk and all my stuff survived!

They’ve now started poring foam onto the fire, over 24 hours latter:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4520430.stm

On September 11 a few years ago, my desk survived but everything was so covered with grey dust that I had to clear out everything including my computer with some completed SETI units on it. :frowning:

I WARNED Watto about storing that much chip oil for his van!

ROFL … falls off chair, gets back up, falls off again :haha: :haha:

Thanks for sharing my images, but next time could you please not leech my bandwidth? Money is tight ATM and I see a huge bandwidth bill looming on the horizon . . .

I’ve put the images onto one of my domains if that helps :wink: just posting the reply will mean a load more views :lol:

DT.