News - Street still recovering after blast
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Five months on its residents - at least those who have chosen to remain in the face of many obstacles - continue to bear that brunt. The explosion that December morning hit the row of terraced townhouses extremely hard - ripping out windows, blowing doors off hinges and even shifting the position of internal walls in some of the houses. This was despite the fact that a kilometre and a dual carriageway separate this street from the epicentre of the blast. What caused so much damage was that the Wellbury Terrace homes were facing the Buncefield site full-on. It was no surprise that images of the 16 homes there featured heavily on TV news reports in the hours and days immediately after the explosion.
A return visit to Wellbury Terrace on the day of the latest report into the causes of the blast provides a snapshot of the different pace at which shattered lives all over Hemel Hempstead are being pieced together again.
The first house is the road is surrounded by metropolitan property and casualty insurance
Peter Daly welcomes me into his transformed home which he estimates has already had more than 20,000 worth of repair work. He says: “Everyone speaks about 11 December but 2 March was the big day for us when the work first started. “Before that everything at the front stayed boarded up. Can you imagine what it was like living here then? It was horrible, cold, dark.”
As Mr Daly talks on the second floor of his property, work continues on the ground floor. He explains that it is a firm providing a “total clean” which will be one of the final touches of the work on the home the 53-year-old shares with his wife Sheila. But he adds: “I don’t know when you’d say we’d be back to normal. I suppose it will be when we have our furniture back where it was.” Mr Daly remains quite philosophical about the events of 11 December, saying, “We have had all this work done, but I can’t imagine the effect on property prices. They must have halved here. I’m less bothered because I had no intention of moving from here anyway.”
Of his feelings toward the ongoing investigation, he says: “I’d like a public inquiry to be held because this was the biggest fire in peacetime history yet it seems we can’t have a public inquiry. “If the depot comes back it’s got to come back as the safest place in the world.” Elsewhere in Wellbury Terrace there is evidence of much work going on to enable all the neighbours to keep up with the Dalys. But few signs of residents. At one of the homes still boarded up is Dave Wheeler.
He explains that his home on the Woodhall estate was badly damaged at a result of the Buncefield explosion and he has moved into Wellbury Terrace since then, working as a carpenter on site to repair the property for the landlord. As he shows me the work he has done, and points out the many tasks still to be completed, he is angry about the effects the Buncefield explosion had on Hemel Hempstead. He called for more let property insurance payouts from those found to be responsible. “They should do more,” he said.
Close to Wellbury Terrace, the van of the worker who owns the local company The Roof Doctor is parked outside a house, which is rented property insurance some final repairs.
Steady work
Coming down his ladder, Alan Syphas tells how the five months since the explosion have kept roofers like him busy. “I was in bed when it all went off. Within five minutes I got a call to go out on a job and ever since then it’s been non-stop - at its peak I was working on up to three houses a day.” Mr Syphas’s firm is one of many casualty insurance property system employed by Herts Property Services to carry out work paid for by insurance firms.
He said: “I didn’t go all out to get work and I’ve just concentrated on doing remedial jobs - fixing and resetting tiles, but I’ve seen at least 200-300 complete re-roofs carried out across the town.”
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