Dungeonness Meltdown

Disaster / Destruction

A partial meltdown irradiates a section of Kent, UK and kills 6000 people.

Forgive me for saying so, but it was beautiful. I've seen many colours of flames before, but never that deep, rich red. I wanted to stare, but the light and heat were so intense I had to turn away. I slowly started to comprehend what was happening, what I had seen. First, I realised that something terrible had happened at the nuclear plant. Second, I understood that what I had seen had just killed me.

— Elizabeth Franks, 57

We were annoyed at first, if you can believe it. The ground shook, the whole convention room bucked upwards and pieces scattered. If you know gamers, you know they don't like having their pieces scattered. So there were curses and mutterings, as if the earth had conspired to disrupt their games on purpose. Then the wave of heat arrived and we started to understand that we were in for more than just a little annoyance.

— Thomas Michaels, 19

I've been to metal foundries, where you walk by all that liquid metal and you inhale and catch the heat of it and the heavy scent. It's very indistinct, but it's there. When you smell it, you can imagine these small particles of steel entering your nose and settling into your lungs, and you feel heavier. Breathing becomes more difficult, and I don't know if that's because of the heat or just the mind playing tricks on you. But that's what it was like. The smell, the heat and all. It was like that.

— Matthew Chadwick, 45

How can you explain the decisions you make after something like that? It's new, so you can't base your decisions on any previous experiences. So you do something, and you may not know why, and it's very possible that it won't take you long to understand that what you're doing is incredibly stupid, but you don't understand that at first because you don't understand anything about the situation at first. I know I should have left, I should have gotten far away, and instead I went to the middle of town.
It was so quiet, like an invisible blanket of snow had fallen over everything. There were no birds singing, no cars, no people talking, nothing. It was like walking on a movie set once the filming has been completed. It was completely eerie but oddly soothing. I felt calm and unhurried. There was nowhere to go, nothing I had to do, because nothing was happening anywhere.

— Meredith Adams, 39