 | | Warehouses damaged in the blast |
Life after Buncefield: Alan Phair Headteacher,Ìý Leverstock Green Church of England Primary School. Initially, IÌý just thought this is going to be fine, nothing much has happened, it was kind of eerily quiet, but I was thinking - there's no problem here, nothing's wrong, then I approached the school and I could see that there were panes of glass that had been blown out. In all, we needed to replace close to a hundred windows.
The big bang meant that there were some children who, following being woken up at 6.00am by that kind of noise, were then concerned about going to bed at night, worrying about what they would wake up to the next morning.Ìý However, in terms of lasting impact on children, I just don't know… There are certainly still ongoing problems for families, in terms of where they are living and we know of a family who will be spending their second Christmas away from their home.
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__________________________________________________________ David Furnell Managing Director of Furnell Transport – on the industrial estate.
We, the industrial people here, believe that the area was just becoming a warehouse, but warehouses don’t actually give much employment. What we want is high tech, good quality building and get people into this area, because it is a wonderful area to live and work in.Ìý We've got everything going for us - communication, airports, everything is around us.Ìý Everybody can be employed and live within 15 miles - from the toilet cleaner to the chairman of the board.
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___________________________________________________________ Dolly Bundy Owner of the only residential property in Buncefield Lane.
After eleven months, it's just got me down and I just can't be bothered with it any more. I'm not the same woman I was, I've gone deaf and I just don't feel the same. I think I'm lucky I'm the nature I am because some women would just be pulled to pieces but it's the Cockney in me that won't let me rest…
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___________________________________________________________ Heidi Brazier Lives in Clinton End, Leverstock Green with husband Carl and their seven children.Ìý Main organiser of residents group. Everybody knows that moving house is stressful and we have had to do it twice in one year - and with seven children, that's no mean feat. The stress levels have been horrendous and I do feel that a lot of the 'powers that be' have forgotten the most important thing in all of this - the people, the human touch, and what it's done to people's lives.Ìý Money can't fix that, money can't fix marriages, it can't fix children's emotions, the psychological damage.Ìý They can get their cheque book out and right off the damage in a monetary form, but the people who have had to live through it will never forget and money will never fix that.
Life now is completely unrecognisable, we have spent an entire year of our lives Buncefield orientated - you eat, sleep, breath it.Ìý Loss adjusters, builders,Ìý building work - you spend days on the phone about this problem, that problem, the other problem…. I think that the blast itself was underestimated; I think that the damage was underestimated, and I think the damage to people's lives and their psychological wellbeing was hugely underestimated and that a lot of people have got on with life and thought "That Buncefield thing - that's all finished now, that's all forgotten."Ìý For those of us living it, it's certainly not, and it won't be for a very long time.
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____________________________________________________________ Ian Silverstein Lived in High Grange (which is now beyond repair) in Cherry Tree Lane, about 100 yards from the first tank that exploded. About seven or eight minutes past six, my girlfriend and I were asleep in bed, when the whole house just basically fell on top of us. Internal doors were taken out, every single window was blown out, the impact was so immense that even the roof was blown off.Ìý The destruction was just unbelievable. It was almost as if someone had picked the house up, shaken it, and then put it back down again.Ìý Nothing was in the right place; everything was where it shouldn't be. It kind of reminded me of one of those really bad Bruce Willis films where he's running through inconceivable destruction and there is chaos going on all around.
The house at the moment, if it was a car it would have been written off instantly.Ìý It's structurally unsafe, it's been looted about forty times, it's now just a very damaged and very abused, once lovely home. It's just sitting there now waiting for someone to be accountable and tell me what to do with it because I'm not in a position to be able to do anything with it all.Ìý It's quite traumatic going back there, and I've seen several people in tears who've seen it, but who never even knew me or what the house was like before. I obviously knew when I brought the house that I was living next to an oil depot,Ìý but I don't think anybody actually believed it could happen.Ìý And I think that's half the problem now, lots of us are having trouble coping with the trauma while our brains are telling us that the impossible actually happened. It was a national disaster. Thank God no one died. We were probably near the front of the queue for that.Ìý But what does it take for the Government to get involved?Ìý What does it take for insurance companies and lawyers to see some humanity in this whole matter and start dealing with things in a timely manner and allow us all to get back on with our lives which, up until then, were reasonably happy and content? It's unacceptable - and someone needs to be accountable for it.
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_____________________________________________________________ Jacqui Campbell Director of Community Partnerships & Housing – Decorum Borough Council.Ìý Also chairs Buncefield Community Recovery Taskforce. Buncefield Community Recovery Taskforce, is a group of organisations - Dacorum Borough Council, Herts County Council, the Primary Care Trust, Job Centre Plus, the Police, the voluntary sector and local community organisations as well; who have been meeting since very early on, and that's continued to go on really.Ìý We have assessed the impact on individuals and communities, and all the way along, we've developed plans and put into action things to address.
For some people, the issues have diminished, however for others, they've stayed and in some cases got worse.Ìý So whilst there is a need for continued support and rebuilding of people's confidence and sense of security in the community, we’ll carry on meeting.
Originally, our sense was that children weren't a group in the community that we needed to pay particular attention to.Ìý However, as time has gone on, the effects have kicked in much more for children and younger people, and we've become much more aware of their need for support . So you've got a number of children who are still disturbed by what actually happened, some are frightened to sleep in their own beds or go upstairs on their own. One year on, many people would say that they've put the whole incident behind them, however many people are still very very badly affected by this, and for those people in particular, I think there's a sense that everybody has forgotten them. That the fire is out, a lot of the visible damage is gone, and that nobody cares any more. And for those people, the pain and the difficulty and the day-by-day fighting to get things done, fighting to be heard, is massive.
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____________________________________________________________ Karen Kucper Lived with Barry her partner, and her 13 year old daughter Millie, in Cherry Tree Lane – opposite the first oil tank that exploded. We lived directly opposite Tank 912, the tank that went up first. I'm not quite sure exactly what woke me up first, I just remember sitting up in bed and I could hear screaming, but it was me that was screaming. I tried to get out of my side of the bed, but it was blocked because the radiator had been blown off of the wall. I got to my daughter's room, but I couldn't get in the room because the door was only hanging from one hinge.Ìý She had three friends on a sleep over. There were four 12 and 13 year olds with carnage all around them.Ìý My daughter had floor to ceiling mirrored wardrobes - how one of those girls wasn't sliced to pieces - I just don’t know.
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Another big explosion happened while we were still in the drive, and it was then that we had to go - we just had to run.Ìý Running down Cherry Tree Lane in the pitch dark was frightening because coming up the other way were people in cars coming to see what had happened, driving at 40 and 50 mph along a single track road as we were trying to get away. We basically had everything taken away from us that day. I refuse to say we 'lost' everything because to lose something implies you've been slightly careless and you've put it down and forgotten where. We had EVERYTHING taken away.Ìý And now, ten months later, we still don't know where our belongings are. We don't know where our life is. We don't know where our life is going. We've been stuck in limbo for ten months.Ìý We're still in the house that the Council provided us with, a house not of my choosing, in surroundings not of my choosing, and none of this is my fault. I need to direct my anger somewhere, because for nine months now, I've said nothing.Ìý I haven't been able to.Ìý I haven't been able to talk about any of this without crying. Crying out of anger and frustration, because somebody somewhere has taken my life away….
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_________________________________________________________ Rev. Simon Cutmore Vicar of Holy Trinity Church Leverstock Green In terms of emotional damage, I know of two families who've actually left Hemel because they found their children just could not cope.Ìý Sleeping with the light on is one thing, but waking up in tears and finding no end to that, is quite another.Ìý It's been very hard on children.Ìý The experts say that the effects of this can take seven or eight years to surface. For adults, I can only hypothesize that it's the same as for the children.
The memories of what took place on that day will live with us for a very long time to come.Ìý It was, after all, the biggest explosion in peacetime Europe; it registered 2.9 on the Richter scale!Ìý However, I'm still well aware that there is a country and a media who still haven't got to grips with the severity of what took place on that day.Ìý No one died.Ìý Very few people were seriously injured. But, its effects are still ongoing….
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____________________________________________________________ Steve Reeve Owner 'Arrow Phone & Computer Services', Queens Square, Adeyfield, Hemel Hempstead
Local business owners come in to see me and it seems as though a lot of people have been affected since Buncefield, probably not at the time, but it's become apparent that a lot of people have suffered quite badly and it's just been really really hard, in fact so hard, that we're considering selling up as the business has become, what I would consider, unviable.
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_____________________________________________________________ We would like to thank everybody who gave their time to take part in this feature. | 
