Disaster Masters dealt with what major conflagration caused by a series of explosions on December 11, 205 at the Hertfordshire Oil Storage Terminal?
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Disaster Masters Disaster Masters was a series on BBC1 which followed the workers of the British emergency and non-emergency repairs company Homeserve as they carried out repair work contracted by householders' insurance companies. During the different series, they were seen dealing with major disasters such as the Carlisle floods, Birmingham tornado and the Buncefield oil depot explosion. They were also seen carrying out more minor repairs such as boarding up broken windows.
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Buncefield fire The Buncefield fire was a major conflagration caused by a series of explosions on 11 December 2005 at the Hertfordshire Oil Storage Terminal, an oil storage facility located near the M1 motorway by Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire, England. The terminal was the fifth largest oil-products storage depot in the United Kingdom, with a capacity of about 60 e6impgal of fuel. The terminal is owned by TOTAL UK Limited (60%) and Texaco (40%).
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Firestorm A firestorm is a conflagration which attains such intensity that it creates and sustains its own wind system. It is most commonly a natural phenomenon, created during some of the largest bushfires and wildfires. Although the word has been used to describe certain large fires, the phenomenon's determining characteristic is a fire with its own storm-force winds from every point of the compass. The Black Saturday bushfires and the Great Peshtigo Fire are possible examples of forest fires with some portion of combustion due to a firestorm, as is the Great Hinckley Fire. Firestorms have also occurred in cities, usually as a deliberate effect of targeted explosives such as occurred as a result of the aerial firebombings of Hamburg, Dresden, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
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1452 Yellow River floods The 1452 Yellow River floods were major natural disasters affecting hundreds of thousands of farmers along the Yellow River in Shandong and Henan, as well as the Huai River valley.
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1983 Royal Artillery Barracks bombing On 10 December 1983 a bomb exploded at the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich, South East London. The explosion injured five people and caused minor damage to the building. The bomb exploded in a guard room, leaving a crater 15 ft deep. A Christmas party was underway in the Sergeants' Mess, around 300 yd away, when the bomb exploded. The Scottish National Liberation Army claimed responsibility for the bombing, stating that "more will follow", although Scotland Yard believed that the IRA were behind the attack. The IRA later admitted responsibility for the attack.
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Seest fireworks disaster The fireworks accident in Seest happened on 3 November 2004, when the N. P. Johnsens Fyrværkerifabrik fireworks factory exploded in Seest, a suburb of Kolding, Denmark. One firefighter died; seven from the rescue team as well as 17 locals were injured. In addition 34 rescuers, 8 police officers and 27 from the Danish Emergency Management Agency were treated for smoke inhalation. The evacuation of 2,000 people from the immediate surrounding area saved many lives. Eight fire and rescue vehicles were also destroyed.
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Crisis management Crisis management is the process by which an organization deals with a disruptive and unexpected event that threatens to harm the organization, its stakeholders, or the general public. The study of crisis management originated with the large-scale industrial and environmental disasters in the 1980s. It is considered to be the most important process in public relations.
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Nuclear Accident Magnitude Scale The Nuclear Accident Magnitude Scale (NAMS) is a scale to measure the severity of a nuclear accident. It was proposed by the British nuclear safety expert David Smythe in 2011 as a response to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, where the conventional International Nuclear Event Scale was used in a confusing manner. Furthermore, it wants to bridge the various shortcomings of INES.
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Great Fire of 1901 The Great Fire of 1901 was a conflagration that occurred in Jacksonville, Florida, on May 3, 1901. It was one of the worst disasters in Florida history and the third largest urban fire in the US, next to the Great Chicago Fire, and the 1906 San Francisco fire.
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Peter Heathfield Peter Heathfield (2 March 1929 – 4 May 2010) was a British trade unionist who was general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) between 1984 and 1992, including the period of the miners' strike of 1984/85.
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2012 United Kingdom fuel crisis In March 2012 Unite trades union warned it was considering a strike over health and safety standards. Unite represents around 2,000 tanker drivers, who deliver fuel to 90% of Britain's forecourts. Although no strike took place, Government action precipitated panic-buying and a woman was very seriously injured after following a minister's advice to store extra petrol.
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Seawise Giant Seawise Giant, later Happy Giant, Jahre Viking, Knock Nevis, Oppama, and finally Mont, was a ULCC supertanker that was the longest ship ever built. It possessed the greatest deadweight tonnage ever recorded. Fully loaded, its displacement was 657019 t , the heaviest ship of any kind, and with a laden draft of 24.6 m , it was incapable of navigating the English Channel, the Suez Canal or the Panama Canal. Overall, it was generally considered the largest ship ever built. It was sunk during the Iran–Iraq War, but was later salvaged and restored to service. It was last used as a floating storage and offloading unit (FSO) moored off the coast of Qatar in the Persian Gulf at the Al Shaheen Oil Field.
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Environmental disaster An ecological disaster is a disaster to the  environment due to human activity, which distinguishes it from the concept of a natural disaster. It is also distinct from intentional acts of war such as nuclear bombings.
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Largest artificial non-nuclear explosions There have been many extremely large explosions, accidental and intentional, caused by modern high explosives, boiling liquid expanding vapour explosions (BLEVEs), older explosives such as gunpowder, volatile petroleum-based fuels such as petrol, and other chemical reactions. This list contains the largest known examples, sorted by date. An unambiguous ranking in order of severity is not possible; a 1994 study by historian Jay White of 130 large explosions suggested that they need to be ranked by an overall effect of power, quantity, radius, loss of life and property destruction, but concluded that such rankings are difficult to assess.
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Summerland disaster The Summerland disaster occurred when a fire spread through the Summerland leisure centre in Douglas on the Isle of Man on the night of 2 August 1973. Between fifty and fifty-three people were killed and eighty seriously injured.
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2013–14 United Kingdom winter floods The 2013–2014 United Kingdom winter floods saw areas of the United Kingdom inundated following severe storms. The south of England saw heavy rainfalls associated with these storms which caused widespread flooding, power cuts and major disruptions to transport. Economically the worst affected areas were Somerset, Devon, Dorset and Cornwall in the south west and the Thames Valley in the south east. The Met Office reported the storms were responsible for the wettest December to January period since 1876. The flood phenomena ranged from coastal flooding, pluvial flooding, fluvial flooding to groundwater flooding. The flooding resulted in the inundation of the majority of the Somerset Levels and saw the main railway line to Cornwall and West Devon at Dawlish severed for several weeks.
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Steam explosion A steam explosion is an explosion caused by violent boiling or flashing of water into steam, occurring when water is either superheated, rapidly heated by fine hot debris produced within it, or heated by the interaction of molten metals (as in a fuel–coolant interaction, or FCI, of molten nuclear-reactor fuel rods with water in a nuclear reactor core following a core-meltdown). Pressure vessels, such as pressurized water (nuclear) reactors, that operate above atmospheric pressure can also provide the conditions for a steam explosion. The water changes from a liquid to a gas with extreme speed, increasing dramatically in volume. A steam explosion sprays steam and boiling-hot water and the hot medium that heated it in all directions (if not otherwise confined, e.g. by the walls of a container), creating a danger of scalding and burning.
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National Emergency Services Museum The National Emergency Services Museum is a museum in Sheffield, England. Opened on 8 May 1984 as the "Sheffield Fire and Police Museum", it was given its present name on 1 January 2014. It is based at a former combined police and fire station (opened in 1900) at the junction of West Bar and Tenter Street near the city centre. A notable feature is one of the few remaining Fire Brigade observation towers in the UK. (The only other known one is at Hatton Garden, Liverpool, when built the headquarters of Liverpool Fire Brigade).
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The Long Emergency The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century is a book by James Howard Kunstler (Grove/Atlantic, 2005) exploring the consequences of a world oil production peak, coinciding with the forces of climate change, resurgent diseases, water scarcity, global economic instability and warfare to cause major trouble for future generations.
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Abbots Ripton rail accident The Abbots Ripton rail disaster occurred on 21 January 1876 at Abbots Ripton, then in the county of Huntingdonshire, England, now in Cambridgeshire, on the Great Northern Railway main line, part of the East Coast Main Line, and previously thought to be exemplary for railway safety. In the accident, the "Special Scotch Express" (known informally to railway workers as 'the Scotchman' although not officially the "Flying Scotsman" until after 1923) train from Edinburgh to London was involved in a collision, during a blizzard, with a coal train. An express travelling in the other direction then ran into the wreckage. The initial accident was caused by:
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2005 Sunjiawan mine disaster The Sunjiawan mine disaster (孙家湾矿难) was a mine disaster that occurred on February 14, 2005 in Fuxin city, Liaoning province, in the northeastern part of the People's Republic of China. Initial reports indicated that at least 214 coal miners were killed, making it the worst mining disaster in China in at least 15 years.
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Explosive train A triggering sequence, also called an explosive train, is a sequence of events that culminates in the detonation of explosives. For safety reasons, most widely used high explosives are difficult to detonate. A primary explosive of higher sensitivity is used to trigger a uniform and predictable detonation of the main body of the explosive. Although the primary explosive itself is generally a more sensitive and expensive compound, it is only used in small quantities and in relatively safely packaged forms. By design there are low explosives and high explosives made such that the low explosives are highly sensitive (i.e. their 'Figure of Insensitivity' is low) and high explosives are comparatively insensitive. This not only affords inherent safety to the usage of explosives during handling and transport, but also necessitates an explosive triggering sequence or explosive train. The explosive triggering sequence or the explosive train essentially consists of an 'initiator', an 'intermediary' and the 'high explosive'.