Background Information to this gallery:

Well-meaning British Waterways staff, who were cutting back overgrown trees and bushes along a canal towpath in Pype Hayes (Birmingham, UK), inadvertently revealed fencing through which could be seen a factory yard full of flammable material. Given that this site was next to a canal bridge under which local yobs regularly met at night, it was inevitable that something would happened. It did, on Saturday 19th June 2004.

I happened to be around to witness this event, armed with my Nikon Coolpix 4500 and a box of matches (err ... only joking folks). The dense acrid smoke (visible for miles) caused closure of a section of one of Britain's busiest roads (the A38) and, as it drifted across the road, the evacuation of customers in the Showcase Cinema opposite. It so happened that, at the time, the latter was showing a 3D version of the classic movie "The Towering Inferno"....and one of the customers remarked that the special effects were so real that one could almost smell the burning...
THANKFULLY THE COMPANY SURVIVED - HERE IS THEIR LINK TO IMAGES SHOWING WHAT WAS LEFT OF THE FACTORY AFTERWARDS: http://expanded-polystyrene.co.uk/devastation.htm


Six years previously, on the opposite side of the canal, and a mere 60-70 yards away from this site, a huge warehouse was also similarly destroyed by an (allegedly 10-year-old) arsonist, presumably called Kyle, Wayne, Bradley, or Callum ...or some other, equally moronic, name.