Well that was rather more exciting than anyone expected. The demolition itself seemed to go to plan. Word came round that it was going to be 07:00 and sure enough, then or thenabouts, the bottoms of the towers blew out and they fell gracefully into a heap much as expected. About halfway through the collapse the bang hit you in the chest and all the power cables over our heads start flapping about. There’s clapping, people replaying their phone videos in slow-mo, thinking about how to deal with the traffic. Then there’s another bang. Louder this time, and much closer. A nearby electricity pole has three very bright arcs, sparks, smoke, then in a second or so it catches fire and we have a firework display after all. We follow the cables back and notice that they’re directly over our heads. Mayhem. Running and screaming (I’m just running). Now we’re in the neighbouring ploughed field - grown-ups, kids, mums with strollers, dogs. The fireworks go out. Order gradually returns. My phone goes - Mrs VB says the power’s gone off. I bet it has.
The trees behind these people hide the ploughed field where I ended up. The leccy-pole-cum-Roman-candle is visible in the background. There was a larger crowd than this one standing underneath it. As I walked back home quite a few blue flashing lights were going the other way.
Do you think the shockwave moved the posts or cables sufficiently for them to touch or was it some kind of unintended surge? You’d have hoped everything of importance would’ve been detached from a condemned power station by now. Is it the same facility originally that collapsed on people a few years ago?
The cables moved much more than I expected. The strange thing was there was a significant gap (2 minutes or more ?) between the towers coming down and the cables going bang. Long enough for me to mention to the family I was standing alongside how the first nuclear bomb people gauged the yield by dropping bits of paper and watching how far the air shock moved them. Then we watched their phone video. Then we started to leave. Then bang.
My first guess would be cables touching. There were also several drones (but I’d have guessed the network would have turned a drone to plasma without going down). The B station at Didcot is very much still alive and the ex-cooling towers do sit right in the middle of its distribution cabling. So much so that at one point they thought explosive blowdown would be too risky. I assume the B station was actually disconnected during the blowdown but I wonder if they tried to reconnect it without realising that something had been damaged ? People have also speculated that the dust cloud, which moved quite slowly, could have affected the cabling when it reached it. We’re all guessing though, really.
Yes, this is the site where the A station’s boiler house came down unexpectedly on the four guys who were inside it. Needless to say those demolition contractors were sacked and other people (Brown and Mason) are in charge now.
Here’s the aftermath of the pole going up. The woman filming has missed the first second or two and she’s a lot further away than we were, so it’s rather less dramatic
