The
Beestonian Shake, rattle and read...
Buimgper
B page 16 ue! Iss
It shook houses, woke many people up and made those already up and about to jump out of their skins. But what was the Beeston Boom? On the 6th of February, at around 7.10 am, a loud, deep boom was heard all over the Rylands, but as far afield as The Crown and The Nurseryman. People rushed to their windows to see if a car had crashed, an earthquake had struck or if a mushroom cloud was rising over Clifton. But nothing. It came, it boomed, it disappeared without trace. We set to work trying to find the cause. The most obvious culprit was an earth tremor: the previous month one had been felt after rumbling out from Leicestershire. Yet the British Geological Society reported nothing of significant across the whole of the British Isles that day. Had a meteor exploded in the morning sky? Again, there wasn’t
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a single sighting, and astronomical monitoring stations also reported no significant activity. Without an obvious explanation, more esoteric explanations came to the fore. Were the bitterns, those shy heron-like visitors to the Nature Reserve, known for a loud booming mating call, invested in megaphones to increase their chances this year? Was it a mass aural hallucination? Was Godzilla smashing the town up: inconsiderate, just as it seems to be coming together after years of being rent asunder. We were baffled, but then we got an answer out of the blue, from a source who came forward but was keen not to be named. Apparently, this had happened before. The source had worked at one of the scrapyards in Dunkirk, where cars are regularly crushed. When doing this, precautions are taken: anything explosive is removed, and the fuel tanks emptied
and vented to ensure they were free of fuel. While this procedure is usually diligently carried out, accidents can happen, and a car can be crushed while still holding fuel. Under great pressure, and with metal on metal causing sparks, the resulting explosion can be very, very loud. The noise easily travels across the very flat floodplains before slamming into Rylands, causing many to drop their toast. But what about the time of day? My source explained that work on the yards starts early, so is entirely consistent. It looks like this is the answer: nothing to do with fracking, the tram, or super-weapons being tested in Barton and Fabis. So a mystery solved. But fear not. Inside this issue we have much more strangeness to baffle. We are also now 16 pages big: you lot keep doing so much stuff 12 pages just couldn’t reflect it. Read on: it’s a real banger of an issue. MB