English Yokel

"Fears of explosion close the M1" reports BBC

The BBC news web site tells us that "Fears of explosion close the M1" and continues to say that the West Coast main line railway has also been shut down. Cause? One van on fire on the northbound hard shoulder. The van was carrying one propane gas cylinder.

Yokel's immediate reaction was to think that "they" haven't had anything recently to make us fearful, so we must be in need of a booster inoculation It doesn't matter why we are fearful, but it is important that we are. Then the authorities can rescue us from that fear by depriving us of yet more civil liberties!

And then he began to wonder about the tremendous power of these propane cylinders when they explode. Don't worry about the design to minimise the chance of explosion! Don't worry about the fact that to do any serious damage it has to get out of the van body! Just let your imagination loose! Just be paralysed by the thought! The police must have been reading their own propaganda from when those fools loaded a couple of vehicles up to "get" London club land and Glasgow Airport.

No, I am not saying that the northbound carriageway shouldn't be shut while the Fire Brigade tackle the fire, but to close the whole motorway for at least two hours, and the adjacent railway is surely overkill. If they carry on crying "Wolf" like this, no-one is going to believe them when there really is a problem.

Update. And then I saw this report about terror chilli sauce. It happened a couple of days ago. Shut down the area for three hours? Given that buses always come in threes, what's next?