Sunday's oil depot fire in Hemel Hempstead (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4520430.stm) has been dominating all the headlines today. That's fair enough, it's a huge fire and has caused a lot of disruption. You'd think from the coverage though that armageddon had arrived and the four horsemen of the apocalypse were about to ride out of the smoke cloud.*
The Daily Express called it 'Hell on Earth', the Sun 'Black Sunday' and the Daily Mail relates the 'apocalypic scenes'**
What's really angered me though is the 'give us your views' part of the 24 News coverage on TV. It's all very well encouraging feedback from viewers, and getting them to send in video and images of the scene, but it shouldn't be accepted that simply because they're a viewer then they must be right.
"We've had a text from someone in Hastings saying they were woken up by the sound of the blast, which gives you some idea of the scale."
No they weren't. Of course they weren't. It's patently ridiculous to even imagine that someone in Hastings on the South Coast was woken up by the sound of a blast that, while spectacular, barely registered with people 20 miles away. If it had been loud enough to wake up someone in Hastings, well over 100 miles away, it would've been so powerful that Hemel Hempstead and many of the surrounding towns would've been completely obliterated.
Some tit even texted in from Holland saying they'd heard it. No he didn't and any respectable news organisation shouldn't be saying he did as if it was fact.
Many people here live very near Hemel Hempstead, one in Bovingdon which is less than five miles away. The force of the blast, which was heard in Holland remember, woke him up and his mother in law's loft hatch sprang open. Devastating.
What is it about some people that requires them to write themselves into events even if it's something totally unrelated to them. They see it on tv and suddenly that slamming car door that woke them up MUST have been the blast. The ultimate manifestation of this phenomenon is the flowers left when celebrities die or there's been a well publicised murder. I didn't know these people but I'm going to pay my respects anyway because I've been told by the news that it's very sad.
It just shows that despite hundreds of years of human development we're still just as gullible as a 15th century peasant being told there's monsters in the sea, the world is flat or smoking a leech will cure your headache.
Unbelieveable.
*Probably coughing
**In fairness, the Mail tends to use that phrase pretty much every day
