The Billericay Fire

The talk of the last few days has been the Billericay fire. Follow the link for the details. I've copied the picture from the BBC site, as I'm not sure how long the link will continue to work. In summary, a workshop caught fire, and because of the things stored in it an exclusion zone of 200 metres was created. This meant a number of people (60 - 200 depending on your source) spent the night in the local Secondary School. The main road from Billericay to Wickford was closed, so there would have been major traffic disruption. So far as we can tell, only one person was taken to hospital, but not with very serious injuries. That's the only good news - it could have been so much worse. Unless of course you happen to attend Billericay school. The school was shut for two days this week. The first for snow - we think. So I expect the pupils thought it was good news too.
A friend was describing seeing the smoke from Basildon (5 to 6 miles away). We couldn't see anything from our house - this is probably because we are just over the crest of the hill, and the wind was blowing towards Basildon and away from us. Karen called to ask us what we knew, as she'd seen more information on her local news than we had on ours!