Friday 11 July 2008

Furniture warehouse fire in Rye

Yesterday we were woken up by fire engines before 7am, and lots of them! The view down the road was this:
More follows in the rest of the post, including pictures of the fire itself.

Particularly concerning as there's a chemical factory down the road, but we went down to have a look and were relieved to see that the fire was on the other side of the road:
It wasn't possible to go any further in the car, for obvious reasons:
Tracy had to go out, but I went on my bike along the path behind the factory units:
I met some firemen down there, and they said it was fine to proceed as long as I didn't go near the building. They also told me it was a pine furniture warehouse that was ablaze, and that there were over 20 fire engines there. The scale of the situation was apparent as I got closer:
OK, I'll stop waffling now, the pictures speak for themselves (don't worry, I wasn't close, just using a long zoom lens). I heard that nobody was hurt in the event, and although I guess the business is insured, that won't be much consolation to the workers, who probably don't have jobs to go to now.
The story was reported in the news in various places, including the BBC and the Hastings Observer (who have a video of the fire).

Mike

2 comments:

Christopher said...

dramatic pictures!
I was at the chemical works 2 days before being shown their impressive safety procedures.
Clearly the pine warehouse was highly inflammable. I wonder if they had identified the risk.

Mike Pepler said...

Cheers. I heard that the fire engines got a lot of their water from the chemical works. We also heard yesterday that one of our friends knew the bloke who owned the place and had some furniture stored there as a favour..... which was obviously not good news for him.