Oh Fell. It Seems To Have Triggered...
Body & Soul2 mins ago
Anyone from Hemel Hempsted? What's going on?? Hope everyone's alright!!
Watching Sky News and waiting for some accurate info. Sounds really scary, pics are incredible.
No best answer has yet been selected by Baronvhb. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.
For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.My husband was woken up at 6:00am this morning to a loud rumbling banging noise on the bedroom door, which also shook the house & set off the alarms in Dunstable Town Centre. He thought there had been a mini earthquake, but after turning on Sky news, found it to be the shock waves from the explosion at the Oil Depot at Buncefield, Hemel Hempstead.
It could also be heard as far away as Surrey.
My girl lives in Hemel and her boyfriend works in a depot next door to the refimery. He would have been arriving at work if that had been tomorrow morning. My girl said she heard what she thought was thunder and it was dark and misty when she got up.
She has still got to go to work dispite they told people to stay in doors. Oddly enough I live in Milton Keynes and although my sister in law heard it, and she only lives down the road from me, I heard nothing. Don't understand how people in Bristol heard it. The acoustics must be good today.
Drusilla:
Can anyone tell me why my windows rattled before I heard the explosion? I was always more arts based than science orientated at school.
I guess that the vibrations may have been moving more quickly through the ground than the air. Therefore, the windows would have "felt" the wobbling first, before the sound waves came dawdling through the air later. I'm a bit rusty on the detalis, but this sort of thing is what helps "them" to measure the depth, location and strength of earthquakes - the waves go through different layers of Earth at different speeds.
This fits the scenerio for a typical industrial accident. If you check it out you will find that many accidents around the world have taken place as this one did, during the night shift at or near the end of a shift when everybody on duty is tired and least alert, and very often at sites were the staff has been ''downsized'' for cost reasons and are under more strain.
Some good examples are - Three Mile Island, Bophal, Chernobyl, The Exxon Valdiz, (and now Hemel Hempstead) etc....etc.... see this site for some info on the subject.
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