A man takes pictures of his daughter backdropped by the huge plume of smoke. Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP
Blogger Shem Maina celebrated his birthday through Saturday night and into the not-so-wee hours - 4 or 5am - of Sunday morning. "Had something to eat and went to bed. I was completely drunk at this stage," he writes on his blog.
He lives close to the Buncefield oil depot which, we now know, exploded three times an hour or two after he turned in. People 100 miles away heard the blasts. But, to Shem's horror, he didn't hear a thing. "Funny thing is, I DID NOT HEAR ALL THREE BLASTS GOING OFF! HOW BIZARRE. There's something seriously wrong with me," he writes. "Message here is, DRINKING IS NOT GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH!"
He's made up for his sound sleep since, posting a steady stream of pictures and comments. His office, like many in the area, has been damaged by the blast. A canteen worker he knows from work was on TV, an evacuee as the fire rages on.
Another blogger who snoozed through the entire thing was "lordlucan1969", who writes: "I thought that something was wrong when I noticed that there was a strange ominous cloud hanging over the village ... It looked at first like a rather angry raincloud, but the more I saw it the more it troubled me."
Blogger Ben Vassie was only two miles from the blasts, and he was woken up by them. Alongside astonishing photographs of near the scene - it looks like a nuclear bomb's gone off - he writes: "[I] was woken at 06:00 by a very loud boom, followed by the whole house shaking, when I looked out the window, the sky was lit up."
The Urban75 blog draws attention to the "fuckwittedness of Fox News" for its tagline "Britain ablaze" (now, it seems amended to "Britain burning"), and for calling Hemel Hempstead a "London suburb". The site adds: "Not satisfied with their jazz interpretation of geography and facts, [they] finally announce ... the terminal isn't a London suburb after all. In fact, it's not even in England or the UK, but is in fact in the "country of Hertfordshire."
Meanwhile, on Flickr, I don't imagine the tag "buncefield" had many - if any - pictures in it before yesterday. This morning, however, it's full of shots of orange balls of flame set against the black smoke, and of country scenes with an apocalyptic background. monty23 has a particularly good collection from various Flickr users.
Do tell us, in the comments, if you saw or felt the blasts, or add the URLs of any good pictures of the aftermath you'd like to share.
