beatworm.co.uk

While I was stationed up in Crewe over the summer, there was a fire on the local business park that was serious enough to make the national news.

It was only few hundred yards away from the office in which I was working, close enough in fact, for us to be asked to vacate the premises in the second wave of safety evacuations that occurred. I grabbed some camera phone snaps on the way. For which I was told off by a passing policewoman, tin foil hat fans.

The whole town was fairly closed down for the rest of the afternoon. Despite the swarms of emergency services vehicles, the fire was not extinguished and carried on into the evening. Afterwards, it emerged that this was due to the fire services concentrating their efforts on a gas depot nearby, keeping it’s stored reserve of oxygen and combustible gas cooled, and isolated.

It was all successfully contained, and life was back to normal the next morning. Nobody was hurt, at which point the media lost interest. I was impressed with how effectively the various supporting services mobilised, co-ordinated and went to work, keeping everybody safe, routing around the disturbance, and guiding everything gently back to normality.