"Part of the M6 motorway could be closed for up to 24 hours after a lorry with gas canisters on board crashed in Cheshire.
The lorry overturned on the motorway between junction 18 at Holmes Chapel and junction 19 at Knutsford.
Traffic is being directed along the A54 and the A556 before being allowed to rejoin the motorway.
The Highways Agency said traffic was queuing southbound to Lymm and northbound to Stoke-on-Trent.
A 200m exclusion zone has been put in place around the crash scene by Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service."
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/7207754.stm
Glad I'm not doing that jaunt today.
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My girlfreind is stuck in this. Shes just before J19 southbound. Its taken her 2 hours to travel 11 miles. She tells me there are now broken down vehicles which is making matters worse.
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It's open again now, apparently.
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Once again the waste of space emergency services have over reacted. There was no fire involved and no likelyhood of these gas bottles exploding. How do I know- well I have premises next to one of the largest gas bottle distributors in the N.West. They were astounded at the panic over a few bottles of gas that had been tipped on their side.Even if they had been leaking, they would have quickly been diluted by the surrounding air.
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Once again the waste of space emergency services have over reacted.
And there speaks the voice of someone who has never waited anxiously for the blue flashing lights to appear on the horizon and provide help when they were in trouble.
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>>Once again the waste of space emergency services have over reacted.
Quite, 2cents.
I've worked with a variety of flammable gas cannisters and, in this situation, there are 3 hazards:
(1) Physical contact with cylinder (falls on you or you crash into it)
(2) Torpedo effect (valve gets knocked off and cylinder flies off like a missile)
(3) Fire (plume of leaking flammable gas catches fire and sets fire to surroundings)
The emergency services were right to close the motorway for a couple of hours to eliminate these hazards. Once the crash has settled down, it's a straightforward matter of sealing off the area, picking up each cylinder and rolling it to the side of the motorway. Simply examine each valve for physical damage / listen for the hiss (or smell) of escaping gas. After that, it's a straightforward hard-sholder recovery job: no need to close more than 1 lane of motorway.
I'm afraid that the Fire Brigade tends to over-react / talk up-fire hazards in order to justify their continuing existence at their present staff levels. The fact is that fires get fewer & fewer every year as building & engineering standards improve: yet this reality is not reflected in Fire Brigade manning levels.
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If your gas bottle was knocked over in your home or workshop, you'd make a quick check to see that it wasn't hissing and take a sniff to see if any of the gas was leaking from it....then you'd stand it up again. If the fire brigade got wind of it, they'd have all your neighbours with in a 3 mile radius out of their homes and camped in a community centre for the best part of 24 hours.
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Well, a Fire Brigade bashing thread. Makes a change from Police bashing I suppose.
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Oh please. There is a huge difference between a fallen over gas bottle in a workshop and a van load spilled on a motorway. In the former case you know exactly what's in there and what the bottle should look like; in the latter case it's unknown, in an exposed and dangerous context even without the risk of gas leak and explosion, and in the presence of hundreds of minimally-maintained cars (read the bodge thread) and their occupants, many of whom are prone to random acts of idiocy. Sealing it off is the only way to guarantee safety.
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News reports tell of the FB cooling down the bottles...WHY ?
There was no mention of fire . Laying a propane/ butane/oxygen bottle on its side does not make it heat up.
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News reports tell of the FB cooling down the bottles...WHY ? There was no mention of fire . Laying a propane/ butane/oxygen bottle on its side does not make it heat up.
Precautions described usually apply to welding type products such as acetylene. Fire and rescue don't do it for fun, they are dealing with a recognised risk.
It might only be a one in 250 chance that everything goes t*ts up at once with immolated innocents but would you want to be justifying that to the bereaved and the press?
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I subscribe to LL's last paragraph. Using the famous 'Health and safety " line, the FB have done all they can to keep their outmoded working practices. Would you give up being paid to sleep at night ?
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And now back to motoring discussion. DD.
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I'm sure that this will be construed as another reason for widening it.
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Mention widening the M6 and the tree huggers appear in their droves to protest . Have you ever actually considered though just how little land an extra lane on each side of the M6 would take up ?
If you have flown over and around the UK in a small plane, you would get some idea of just how much unused land this country consists of. . A ten foot strip on either side of a motorway isn't going to make any recognisable difference.
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