six thirty

Children were blown out of their beds. Someone phoned the BBC and said everything had gone black but he found his friend. They couldn’t get out of the door because it was twisted but they could go down what was left of the stairs. He thought he wasn’t hurt. The BBC person said ‘I don’t know what you are talking about’. Later she apologised. That was after one thousand mobile calls, texts and video pictures. They heard firecrackers in Taunten and plane crashes in Westminster and in Hamel Hampstead the roaring was followed by a pressure blast and then explosions.

Someone else phoned and said ‘It is coming from the refinery. I have smelt gas there for two weeks’. Thereby giving the cause before the event happened.

We all have become prophets. There is a collective mind which is free of the official narrative. We were trained by the London bombs. We knew the man shot then was not a terrorist. We knew the phone system had been shut down and now we know the cloud approaching us is toxic even though the police announcement says it isn’t. ‘Then why is it black mommy?’. Some of us heard the car alarms yesterday. We thought an earthquake was coming. I awoke before the windows rattled.

Everyone knows of the vast petrol vapour bombs the Americans used in Iraq. Everyone knows that heat and flame with metal and plastic makes toxic fumes. Everyone knows the wind direction and everyone is phoning their lovers before the cloud comes and they shut down the phones again.

It is another officially designated emergency incident. Everyone knows how fragile this society is. When the Member of Parliament comes on to reassure us as any incident like this is immediately political and he has instructions in a manual everyone knows he is bullshitting. The company spokesman comes on after the MP and says that their first thought is to find their employees so they can’t say anything else now except there has been an incident. The blue orange flames at this time are 200 feet in the air. It turns out that only two employees were there to watch over sixty million gallons of leaking aviation fuel. They are missing but this isn’t official. The spokesmen say we are not to worry because it is an industrial area and not a suburb. It was early morning. For him.

Except we do worry because some of us know the workers who were up in the early morning in the factories there making chips for the MacDonald’s in the city the next day. Some of us have friends in the sink estates next to the refinery fence. Some of us even know the gypsies encamped in the scrub.

The news stations now ask for video phone shots of the flame. They are now competing for extra-ordinary coverage. Fools creep close to the flames with their mobiles. As usual the police and firemen hurl themselves towards some unknown horror.

By now all of us know about the bad safety, the rotten town planning, the official narrative of political spin. The explosion was only thirty minutes ago. We all know before the Prime Minister, before the head of the Police, before the hospitals.

Bhopal, Baghdad- the smoke is coming. Children blown out of their beds! It is my duty to record it.

Two days later what is being called the cloud of death is falling towards the city with fine particles of highly toxic metals and plastics. No-one from the health services has mentioned the fragility of life or the temporary nature of this stage of capitalism. They have advised against the use of face masks unless we have been issued them already.

There has been no loss of life but the loss of thousands of designer Christmas frocks and tons of exotic liqueurs in the destroyed industrial park. A man says that they are not draining the heavily polluted Grand Canal (I thought that was in Venice but no, it is in Hertfordshire!) to combine with the foam from all over the country, the national foam resource, to smother tank twelve which is the centre of all fire, that is unless tank seven cracks in which case here we go again. They are being careful not to pollute the ground water which would be impossible anyway, like this fire was, because of the high tech safety precautions the company uses. Very high tech. They know what they are doing these people. They do the nuclear plants too.

A person interviewed later says they have seen foam at the plant for two weeks. That person was standing by three cars melded together buy the 1000 degree heat which, says the fire chief, could never rupture the remaining tank containing an unknown liquid. Behind him is a picture of boats on the Grand Canal carrying the pipes from the very heavy duty pumps previously used to drain those welsh floods last year.

What an exciting fire. Much better than the underground bombs in the fall because of no sudden loss of life (the carcigens are long-term) and all of has just as good time and place defining superlatives. It gives meaning for a few weeks this fire. Then there will be the inquiry too next year. That will be political drama. The whole thing is huge and just like a movie.

What superlatives? The largest peace time fire in Europe ever that’s what! That qualification only because of Dresden -- although I’m not sure about not counting when the Channel formed in the great volcanic world rift before that ice age. But it can be now seen from space (but who is looking?)

There is oil burning over things everyday and bombs fall everywhere though. The difference is that this has a local story, a narrative structure. We are contained now between the Thames and the Black Cloud of Death. We are waiting for it to fall. We know now that we have always been waiting here between cloud and river. At least I have. One woman says that first it was the doodlebugs, then the V2’s then football hooliganism and immigration, now this! What next?

The chief fireman says that it is almost out but in many ways it is worse than ever. No-one should be concerned. That is why they are closing the roads.

The apocalypse is continuous and I am in it! It is all around in small particles. It is all contradictions and all dissonances. It is so bad it is actually good for you. It is disappearing from our understanding like flames under foam. I am in it! Are you?