Chelmsford Explosion

Yesterday, I was looking after our son while Debbie went to
Matalan to buy some children’s clothes. Mark was happily watching a DVD of Dora
The Explorer when, at 1:20 pm, the power went off. Frustrated and not
understanding a power cut, he kept pressing the on/off switch of the TV.
Everything was dead, our phones included, for twenty minutes or so.

Debbie rang my mobile, having tried to ring the landline. Power had gone in the
centre of town. Traffic lights were out, and there was black smoke. Matalan
could only take cash payments and provide handwritten receipts. She had
presented three items at £4 each and one at £5. The cashier had needed a
battery-operated calculator to work out it came to £17.

Once power was restored, we had an email alert come in from the Essex Chronicle. There had been
an explosion at an electricity substation in town, near the Rivermead campus of
Anglia Ruskin University. At this point, we started surfing for information. It
was an interesting, if disturbing, exercise is watching coverage develop.

The Chronicle was probably first,
but commenters there (more on them in a minute) said they had heard from
reliable sources that there had been a fatality. The paper wasn’t reporting
this initially. However, the East
Anglian Daily Times confirmed this first. Later, the BBC reported on
the fire, complete with video footage. Essex Fire And Rescue’s report is here (incident
7967). The commenters on the Chronicle’s story showed the power of contemporary
citizen journalism, in reporting the tragic death. Other stuff was speculative:
one person claimed the explosion was caused by someone trying to commit suicide
by dangling from two high voltage wires. This allegedly was the fatality, and the
cause of the fire and power outage.

The explosion had been at around 12:20 pm, so our power cut
was an hour later, which seems a little strange to someone like me who doesn’t
understand these things. Other parts of north Chelmsford were out for longer. Our
church cleaner phoned to say that she hadn’t been able to complete her duties,
because the power cut had put the vacuum cleaner out of action. Others were
certainly without power until about 4:30 pm, and some weren’t restored until
this morning.

But I want to return to the commenters on the Essex
Chronicle story. When I looked a few minutes ago, the story had 160 comments. Yesterday,
I had been shocked by many of them. Some people clearly wanted to feel they
were in the middle of great earth-shaking drama, hence the idiot who said it
was like 9/11 in Chelmsford. That seems appallingly insensitive to those who
lost three thousand loved ones.

But others were cruel, if not obscene. Today, there is an extended
comment from the paper’s assistant editor, Matt Adams. Here his his post:

IT’S a peculiarly British trait to find humour in the face of
doom and gloom, but it takes a certain kind of person to laugh at the loss of a
human life. This week the town of Chelmsford was plunged into chaos when a man
was killed in an explosion at a sub-station near Anglia Ruskin University. At
the time of going to press we have no idea as to his identity or motivation,
and it will be up to an inquest to determine whether he did in fact take his
own life. As part of our remit to bring you the news as it happens, the
Chronicle published breaking details about this story on our website –
http://www.thisistotalessex.co.uk – something we do on a daily basis for other items
without cause for concern. But for inexplicable reasons, the tragedy of a man
losing his life in a terrible, horrific fashion, proved stimulus for a barrage
of sick humour and mindless insults posted as comments in relation to this
story. As literally hundreds of these comments began filtering through, our
website team deleted the most extreme and offensive, but ultimately chose to
allow freedom of speech to the twisted individuals who decided to make mockery
of this tragedy. Why? Because we believe in the fundamental decency of the
majority of our readers to shame these few offenders into ceasing their abuse.
Your outrage at their lack of common decency was just as inspirational as their
comments were offensive. Had we simply deleted everything posted on the site we
would have been accused of censorship, rather than allowing freedom of debate
between two such dichotomous viewpoints. Maybe as a consequence those who
posted the more unpleasant comments will be suitably humbled to never do so
again. We can but hope.

I endorse much of what he says. However, I find some of it
puzzling, if not worrying. I don’t see why the paper is worried about the
accusation of censorship. It isn’t about censorship, it’s about editorial
judgment. The foul comments would never have made their way to the letters page
of the print edition. Even some of those that were let through are still
profoundly offensive. Just what is it that makes us worry about censorship when
we are on the Internet, but happily accepts editorial judgments in print? Internet
users are in any case used to the idea of comment moderation, and a set of
terms and conditions to accept before entering a discussion on a website. So the
censorship argument doesn’t wash with me.

I can leave our copy of the Essex Chronicle around the house
without worry, even if I might need to explain some stories to our children. Yet
there is no way I would have read out to them some of yesterday’s comments. Not
only were the sentiments foul and bereft of what Matt Adams calls ‘common
decency’, some even worked offensiveness into their user names and alleged home
towns. However, there were clearly no filters in place to prevent the
appearance of profanities on the site. On this basis, I’ll have to include the
Chronicle’s site in the appropriate restricted list for parental control.

Apart from that, it seems a futile hope to me to think that
outraged comments will shame these people into better behaviour. They can
perpetrate their filth from behind a computer screen and it all feels so
remote, which is why they wouldn’t make these statements face to face. But for
the same reason, outrage will not humble them. Matt Adams says, ‘We can but
hope.’ I am sure he is genuine. But the tone of his final sentence gives away the
sense that this is a weak hope (if not a forlorn one, in my opinion). I think
it’s time to question the libertarian ethos behind much Internet philosophy. You
don’t have to become the Chinese government to believe in decent comment
moderation.

UPDATE, 4:40 PM: Our weekly copy of the Essex Chronicle has arrived this afternoon. It transpires that Matt Adams’ post reproduced above now constitutes one of this week’s two leader articles.