Crikey, I lives miles and miles away and it woke me up with a fright.
It was like thunder, got up dogs seemed agitated. Let them out for a wee
and my cat came rushing in meowing. You could hear lots of birds complaining too.

I live near Wallingford, Oxon.

My thoughts go out to anyone that has been affected by the blast.

Kirstine

News reports are saying minimal casualties - we didn't hear anything here in MK. but just spoken to #1 son in Hatfield - he was awake at the time and heard it.

I have family in Stevenage and they heard it and can see the smoke. I am in Essex and was awake but didn't hear a thing!

I live in Sevenage and never heard a thing.  I can what looks like faint cloud but unless I knew what had happened I wouldn't suspect it was smoke.

Worryingly my daughter and boyfriend on their way back from Budapest and I have to pick them up from Luton at 12.15pm.  Just hope that by the time they get here the flights aren't distrupted.

I think I'd be more worried about road traffic disruption - M1, M10 closed in the area, and M40 seriously disrupted.

I should be ok from Stevenage as I will go through Hitchin and catch the A505, only takes about 25 mins.  Might be a bit more traffic but the 505 pretty fast duel-carriageway

My relatives in Hemel Hempstead are all O.K. but they have been warned that more explosions are likely and have been advised to stay indoors!  Apparently, some factories on the same estate as the oil depot have been 'flattened' by the explosion!

We're under a mile from the Herts border, but didn't hear a thing, although I did wake up about that time :) The sky does look a bit 'mucky' over towards the south-west - maybe nothing.

Daisy

I have only just switched my telly on and thought id see if i can find anything about it on here - whats going on is it suspected terrorists again?
This is all very upsetting.

The police are treating it as an accident - in other words, they have no reason at the moment to think otherwise, but you never know ...

Daisy

How many blasts have there been?just one?i do hope everybody is ok

Just watching news it was at an oil depot - i think it was an accient - what concerns me is the fires burning :-( i didnt realise quite how big it was, peoples windeows and doors blown off - i hope everybody was tucked up in bed :-(

Oh no,people are panic buying petrol again :-(

I do know that this is one of the Texaco oil depots - and I think it is one of these major oil depots around the country which are used by many of the oil companies.

No 1 son works for Texaco, and one of his depots is as Flitwick - so I presume that his office is up in flames :(

Margot

What is it? whats happened? is it a Zepplin raid on Flitwick? I bet they were after the Cardigan base, thought the airships stopped going from Cardigan though!

Don't have an attack of the vapours, Miss Martha/Dennis - it was an accident :D

Airship Industries are still at Cardington - they don't use hydrogen any more though Denis ;)

Denis?? was it Denis did it? I should have known he was a smoker.

Not long stepped in from picking daughter up from Luton Airport.  Business as usual over there and no sign of any smoke.  Daughter saw it flying over and said it was quite amazing.  Apparently nothing to suspect other than an accident.  The depot supplies Luton, Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted airports and comprises of a few petrol companies.  The police have asked people not to panic buy petrol but every petrol station I passed had queues :rolleyes:

Margot Flitwick is fine, we live close to J 12 of the M1 and didnt hear anything. Hubby had to go to work by train as M1 closed and they say may stay closed until after tomorow mornings rush hour, which should be fun :(

Friends in a village just out side Hemel said they were woken by the explosion and that it moved the house enough to take the windows off of the catch. Thankfully there appear to have been very few casulties.

Having just seen the footage I can believe that they are going to have to let this burn out so I would say there will be disruption in the area certainly until tuesday/ Wednesday as they cannot get close enough to do anything other than try to keep ther remaining buildings and storage facilities as cool as possible and to be honest that looks quite futile as the water does not appear to be traveling very far. 

Big Dave has just phoned from work - he went to fill up with LPG on the way in - the petrol station had the two outside lines of petrol pumps coned off, so Big D pulled up alongside the best LPG pump for the filler cap on his car, which just happened to be on the outside. He checked with the cashier it was OK to fill, on his return the to car he was nearly assaulted by one of our 'colonial cousins' who accused him of queue jumping! Big D said if his car could run on LPG he was more than welcome to fill up first..........

It's madness out there!

Siege mentality strikes again  :rolleyes: what happened to the good old British stiff upper lip for heavens sake its not the end of the world.......*wanders off grumbling*

Not helped by the news broadcasters................
Who implied that there could be fuel shortages :(

ARRRGGHHHHH - Says she who was going to fill up yesterday and didnt bother.
Oh well C'est La Vie.

Al's been round - it looks as if they're going to have "refugees" from Flitwick in their offices for the foreseeable future - the office at Fritwick just isn't at the mo!   So I pity the poor souls who are going to have to negotiate the (is it open) M1 & then round M25 to the QEII bridge.

Only 2 injured seriously though - bad for them, I know, but how lucky is it, that it happened at 6am on a Sunday morning!

Margot

>Not helped by the news broadcasters................Who implied that there could be fuel shortages

Just heard this too! Fortunately we filled up the car on the way back from Reading last night because there's something about the word "fuel" that sends the residents of Sussex into panic buy mode. So I'm willing to bet that the queues will be round the block at every garage hereabouts tomorrow. All of which will, of course, promptly run out of petrol and then BBC South East news will send a camera crew out to report this inevitability which of course only proves to the panickers that they were right to panic. Hey ho! :)

Glad to hear no fatalities being reported from the blast at Hemel Hempstead though.

Groan got up at 5 20 am to take OH to station, checked and M1 was open so he drove in.... 4pm what do they do? Shut motorway, so OH has to come home by train and I have to go fetch him and another 5 20 start tomorow groan. I know it could have been so much worse (at 6 am most weekdays he would have been driving past ) but would someone please tell us what is happening so we can try to get on with our lives. 

Well we live nr Huntingdon which is miles away, but at my work all of our servers for our internal intranet and all our customer details are kept next door to the blast and our company is at a standstill.  We have no intranet/no emails/no access to our 100,000 customer accounts!  All our comms since thursday have been lost!  We are not likely to be up and funning again until thursday :(

Small thing compared to anyone who has been hurt/directly affected by this though. :(

I live in Hemel Hempstead, about 2 miles away from the oil depot,. I can happily report that me and my hubby slept soundly through the actual blast....Mum always said i could sleep through a bomb.
When i eventually woke that morning my inbox on mobile phone was full of texts from relatives and neighbours asking what the fxxk was that! Thought they had all gone mad until my mum rang. I looked out the window to a scene i can only describe apocoliptic (sp). As a resident i can only thank God no one was killed!!
Children now off school until after xmas by the looks of things, but i don't mind, with that thick black smoke over our heads i wouldn't want them anywhere else.
P.S The dog never made a sound either at the blast.

P.S The dog never made a sound either at the blast.

I suspect that the most mine would have done is look for the retrieve - lord only knows what they thought would have been shot with a bang like that :D

Glad we are not the only ones who slept soundly through it - our neighbours thought we were wierd and we are 20 miles away!

:D :D :D @ ruby_tuesday

I have terrible sleeping patterns but when I am asleep there is no waking me either.  My children are also like me, one daughter (now 21) slept through a fire evacuation at a lakes district hostel when on a school trip 10 years ago.  Her friends, teachers, fireman couldn't wake her up and as the alarms had been set off "accidentally" a teacher sat with her until the hostel was given the all clear.  Every year when the teachers give the children "the talk" before they go on the trip my daughter is mentioned :D

I live in Stevenage and didn't hear although others living here did.  However, I would have thought living in HH you would have heard something as it measured 2.5 on the Richter Scale! :D

I rather suspect that there will be a big boom in disaster planning and disaster recovery over the next few months! It costs surprisingly little to have back up servers on perminant standby to switch to in case of an emergency, yet so few companies bother to protect (or even back up properly) their most valuable asset.