Have a Jolly D birthday Dave
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This seems grossly mismanaged. Glad you got out in one piece. Weren’t a bunch of the demolition crew killed at the other set of towers in Didcot a few years back?
On the BBC report they were just telling us that a spokesman had said there was no connection to the power cut whilst simultaneously showing footage of the towers dropping and the cables supported by those wooden poles beginning to leap about almost immediately. Well, within 2 or 3 seconds anyway. The poles themselves didn’t appear to be moving.
They were killed when the boiler house came down unexpectedly. The basic principle of explosive demolition is that you weaken the structure as much as possible beforehand so you can use as little explosive as possible, because when you do drop the building it’s the explosive which blows pieces of it all over the landscape. Believe it or not the huge (it’s a power station) boiler was hanging on some sort of suspension to keep its vibration from shaking the building too much in normal operation. The story suggests (let’s wait for the court case though) that the engineers who did the ‘how much weakening is safe ?’ sums failed to take into account the properties of this suspension system. So the poor sods who were cutting the internal supports away found that they’d removed one too many.
The same useless company were technically also responsible for dropping the first three cooling towers. But they subcontracted all the decision making to an expert and, as a consequence, they came down absolutely perfectly. The company’s only involvement was with the security, crowd management, PR etc which they fucked up completely. Left to themselves the large crowds of onlookers came to no harm. So in retrospect maybe they were in safer hands on their own than they would have been if Useless McUseless had tried to take care of them.
VB
That’s right. The cables flapped, a lot, but the poles were fine. The BBC says the delay between the towers falling and the electrical explosion was short. But it wasn’t that short. It was definitely into the minutes, not just a few seconds. It could be though that there was some almost simultaneous initial fault followed by a slow temperature rise before the cables really let go.
VB
Aluminium cables, so a decent fire?
The arcs were blue/violet for as long as they lasted, not obviously green (copper), but they were bloody bright so my colour vision might not have been completely reliable. And air arcs have a lot of gas emission too.
VB
Sounds like a cracking morning and worth getting up for
That should be enough to ignite aluminium, white flame.
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Hound walking and they came across a juvenile mink, screeching like a banshee. Luckily the hounds just sniffed and left will alone.
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reorganising the music library to use the Auralic as a server. Filling the hard disk in the car with music - it has the slowest USB interface in the world…
Completed adding all my vinyl into Discogs. 
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Being very glad i don`t live in Didcot 
Oh, it’s got quite a lot going for it Phil 
. Because there’s so much building work here it has a decently large and well-funded Building Control operation. You’d have had no trouble getting your neighbours’ shenanigans pulled down (literally) if your local authority had been SODC. They’d have been down on them like a ton of cooling tower rubble 
!
Speaking of which, it seems they’ve worked out what went wrong this morning. The bits of the towers which were packed with explosives were also wrapped with steel mesh to contain the debris. It seems a piece of this ended up in the live 33kV cables which do run worryingly close to the tower bases (they power the station services so would have been a pain to switch off). The question then becomes ‘What’s the weakest link - the fuse, if you like ?’ and it turns out it wasn’t the flying mesh. It was the cabling on the pole and in due course that reached fusing temperature and tried to open. Not really being a fuse, it struggled, hence the protracted fireworks.
Classic risk assessment failure. The 33kV people had been told that nothing was supposed to fly far enough to reach their cables. So they didn’t ask the question ‘Yes, but if it does, where is the next weakest link ?’. If they had asked that question they might have worked out that it was on a pole directly above the heads of the assembled spectators. Fail.
VB
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Nice photo of the Cobra? - No one is looking at it though because there is a lady in a pink dress walking past.
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You turning into Jeremy Clarkson Rob, with the jacket n’ jeans?
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That was the idea🤣
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Quick fap - Ooooohhhh beautiful car 
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Now sort the listing by mean value and surprise yourself.
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