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!

Unsafe building

1) Today we had a fire alarm in the building. We duly left our desks and walked slowly down the stairs to the fire exit. No-one could open the door, we turned around went down another floor and out the main entrance. 40 minutes later we were back at our desks. The building is poorly managed. If there is a serious fire people will die in this building - more than need to. There is lots of building work going on, as the alarm started the man with the radio turned to one of the workers and asked if he had a permit for the work he was doing - thought he should have checked that first.
A tragedy waiting to happen.

2) As I went out for a sandwich I walked past one of the buildings that is clad in scaffoldings. A crane was hauling a large structure to the top of the building. The structure was pre-welded I-beams, and I estimate it was about three storeys tall. It was resting on the scaffolding. There were men at various levels trying to push it away. I would not have wanted to be up there for anything.
An accident waiting to happen.

Which just goes to prove that human beings are often careless, incompetent, or negligent. We all are at some point in our lives. Mostly there will not be serious consequences, sometimes there will be. We live in that sort of world, it the sort of world that we should all be used to, but to some of us it never quite makes sense - especially when its me making the mistakes.

By God's grace we can be forgiven for all time for our 'mistakes', even if we can never forgive ourselves fully.