The oil depot fire raged for three days. “Wherever you looked, you could see devastation. The windows of the buildings were blown out and all the cars were damaged,” recalls Wayne Crossman, a 43-year-old firefighter from London who attended the scene.
Crossman was among 250 firefighters deployed to the Buncefield oil depot in Hemel Hempstead early on a Sunday morning in December 2005. The explosion of the first oil tank was so intense it measured 2.4 on the Richter scale and ignited 20 more. Over 250,000 litres of firefighting foam was used to extinguish the flames, creating huge volumes of contaminated runoff.
