Buncefield fire
conflagration, resulting from explosions at the Hertfordshire Oil Storage Terminal on 11 December 2005
The Buncefield fire was a major fire at an oil storage facility that started at 06:01 UTC on Sunday 11 December 2005 at the Hertfordshire Oil Storage Terminal, located near the M1 motorway, Hemel Hempstead, in Hertfordshire, England. The terminal was the fifth largest oil-products storage depot in the United Kingdom, with a capacity of about 60 million imperial gallons (270,000 m3) of fuel. The terminal is owned by Total UK Limited (60%) and Texaco (40%).
The first and largest explosion occurred near tank 912, which led to further explosions which eventually overwhelmed 20 large storage tanks.
The emergency services announced a major emergency at 06:08 and a firefighting effort began. The cause of the explosion was a fuel-air explosion in a vapour cloud of evaporated leaking petrol. The British Geological Survey monitored the event, which measured 2.4 on the Richter scale.
News reports described the incident as the biggest of its kind in peacetime Europe and certainly the biggest such explosion in the United Kingdom since the 1974 Flixborough disaster. The flames had been extinguished by the afternoon of 13 December 2005. However, one storage tank reignited that evening, which firefighters left to burn rather than attempting to extinguish it again.
The public source identifies “Buncefield fire” as conflagration, resulting from explosions at the Hertfordshire Oil Storage Terminal on 11 December 2005. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Buncefield, fire and conflagration.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19184. Authority coordinates are 51.764, -0.424. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2005 and 1974.
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This entry incorporates text from “Buncefield fire” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.