Hayes resident describes massive explosion and raging substation fire as hundreds forced to evacuate

Hayes resident describes massive explosion and raging fire as hundreds forced to evacuateThe Independent

Transcript

00:00Last night I was sleeping and around say 11 o'clock I had a massive explosion,

00:05seemed like a gas explosion but I never thought nothing of it, I thought maybe it could be a

00:09car crash and it's only until my cousin who lives a few blocks over there called me and

00:14said he could see a fire from his loft really building up and then literally as soon as I

00:21spoke to him we had a serious power cut, no electricity, no wi-fi, no internet or nothing

00:27like that, the road was out and then went down there, all the residents were told to leave from

00:34their properties and then the fire was really kind of raging quite heavily and then the fire

00:43brigade came, the police came and I think it must have been going on for at least an hour to two

00:48hours but it's a fire, it's an electric station which has been there for years, we've lived here

00:52for years so I've never ever seen any accidents or any fires or any explosions so it's very

00:59strange how that happened and then literally power just kind of slowly came back around in

01:07the early hours of the morning but at the moment there's a lot of smoke in the air, some residents

01:12were told to evacuate last night and some residents were told to go to a local Asda and stuff like

01:18that but I think it kind of came under control after a few hours so it was okay.