24th December 2015
This month is the 10th anniversary of the fire at the Buncefield Oil Terminal near London. The explosion that started the fire was the largest in peacetime Europe, measured 2.4 on the Richter scale and could be heard as far away as The Netherlands. Thankfully, no-one was killed as the incident took place early on a Sunday morning and so the busy industrial estate opposite the site was almost deserted.
The terminal was majority-owned and operated by Total, with Chevron owning a minority stake. I was part of the Chevron in-house team that managed the communications in the immediate aftermath of the incident, and helped to protect the company’s reputation during the official investigation and legal cases that followed.