Five other people in hospital after incident at defunct plant, where union says workers were preparing boilers for demolition

Expert search teams are continuing to survey the collapsed area of Didcot power station in Oxfordshire in an attempt to locate the three people who remain missing following Tuesday’s “major incident”, which is so far confirmed to have killed one person with four others receiving treatment in hospital.

Police, fire, search and rescue and ambulance crews were called to the site of the former coal-fired Didcot A shortly after 4pm on Tuesday. There was a partial collapse of a large building, approximately 300m long and ten storeys high.

Although the building on the Didcot A site, which closed in 2013, had been due for demolition in the coming months, the collapse was unplanned.

A spokeswoman for nPower – which owns the Didcot A and B power stations – said: “We can confirm that shortly after 4pm this afternoon part of the boiler house at our former Didcot A power station site in Oxfordshire collapsed while an external demolition contractor was working in it. Our thoughts are with the families of all those involved in this tragedy.”

Coleman and Company, the firm behind the demolition, tweeted: “We are aware of an incident at Didcot A Power Station. We are working with all stakeholders to establish facts and will keep you updated.”

Oxfordshire’s deputy chief fire officer, Nathan Travis, said: “It is with great sadness that I have to confirm one person has died during this incident. Our priority now is to find the three missing people.

“The search will be a considerable undertaking due to the instability of the site. We expect the search will continue through the night and possibly into the coming days.”



Speaking to reporters outside the site, Travis said at the peak of the incident there were 50 to 60 firefighters at the scene. Three fire engines had left the decommissioned power plant in the previous hour.



Travis said the techniques being used to find the missing three workers had been tried and tested abroad by specialists in collapses following earthquakes. Asked whether his officers had dealt with something on this scale previously, he said: “In terms of Oxfordshire it is unique.” He said there was no indication of how long the search operation would continue.



Fire engines from Oxfordshire were at the scene, along with specialist search teams using sniffer dogs and Thames Valley police. Six ambulances and two air ambulances also attended. Buckinghamshire and Milton Keynes urban search and rescue team said it had sent four vehicles and eleven people to assist at the scene, leading to speculation that there were people trapped in rubble.

Oxford university hospitals NHS foundation trust said casualties were being taken to the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford and asked the public to stay away unless suffering “serious or life-threatening emergencies”. Four victims were still in hospital on Tuesday night, two in a serious condition and two with minor injuries.

Pictures from the scene showed a significant chunk of a building collapsed with a large amount of debris on the ground. The building was ten storeys high and approximately 300m long.

A spokeswoman for Coleman and Company told the Oxford Mail that the site was “under demolition” but could not confirm whether there were explosives in the collapsed building. There was no immediate official statement from the company.



RWE nPower tweeted:

npower (@npowerhq) We are working with our contractors Coleman and Company to establish the facts re the tragic events at #Didcot

A GMB union official told the Press Association: “We understand that workers were preparing two boilers for demolition in the coming weeks. This led to the collapse of a building.”

The official said he did not believe there had been an explosion.

The Didcot and Wantage MP, Ed Vaizey, tweeted:

Ed Vaizey (@edvaizey) Very concerned about terrible events at Didcot power station. Praying for workers and their families.

Witness Bill McKinnon told the BBC: “I was sitting in my front room, I can see the power station quite clearly from where I am, it’s only about 400 yards away.



“About 4 o’clock, when I heard the explosion and the very loud rumbling, by the time I had got up and looked out of the window there was a huge cloud of dust which came through and over our village.

“When that had cleared I noticed that half of the old power station, where they used to keep the generators, half of that was missing.

“There wasn’t any physical feeling, it was only noise. When they took down the cooling towers a couple of years ago it was about the same volume as that. It was quite loud.”

He added: “I was a little bit surprised because normally the contractors let us know when they are going to do explosions, so I was a bit surprised because we hadn’t heard anything.

“Very shortly afterwards the air ambulance turned up and then fire engines and ambulances started arriving, and a little while after that another air ambulance turned up, and I think they are still there.”

David Cooke, whose company Thames Cryogenics has a building overlooking the power station, said: “Our building shook and as we looked out of the window, the end of the main turbine hall collapsed in a huge pile of dust.

“It totally obscured the towers and must have drifted across the roads and main rail line. What’s left looks a tangled mess.

“The dust was hanging over the area for five to 10 minutes.

“First thought was, it didn’t looked planned, followed by the thought that people are going to have been hurt.”

Thames Valley police tweeted:

Thames Valley Police (@ThamesVP) We remain at Didcot Power Station following a report of collapsed building. We will share more details as soon as they are confirmed #Didcot

Didcot A opened in 1970 as a coal-fired power station and was later converted so it could generate power from natural gas.

Three of its six cooling towers were brought down in controlled explosions last year, and the remaining three were soon due to be demolished along with some other large buildings on the site. According to the RWE npower website, total demolition of the site is expected to be completed by the end of this year.

Didcot B, a modern gas-fired power station, is next to the collapsed plant. It was not clear if its operation had been affected by the incident.