A report has highlighted a catalogue of errors faced by firefighters tackling the 2010 blaze at Aldermaston’s nuclear weapons base.
Following a freedom of information request, campaign group the Nuclear Information Service (NIS) has published an incident debrief by the Berkshire fire service into the incident at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) in August last year.
The document reveals crews were hampered by poor communication, broken fire hydrants and tight security.
NIS director Peter Burt hit out at AWE for attempting to downplay the scale of the incident.
He said: “The report makes it crystal clear that this was far from being the ‘relatively small fire’ that AWE’s chief executive described afterwards to members of the local liaison committee for the site.
“The brave firefighters who attended the blaze were let down by failures and shortcomings in AWE's own safety arrangements.”
On August 3 a solvent in a building containing non-nuclear explosives ignited. Up to 68 firefighters and 16 appliances tackled the fire for around nine hours.
Roads for over half a kilometre around the Aldermaston base were locked down for 11 hours and 14 residents had to be evacuated from homes on Red Lane.
But according to the report, firefighters only knew the building contained explosives after overhearing a phone call between the base’s own fire team.
And crews rushing to the site were held up by the tight security around the base for up to an hour.
Once onsite the separate teams dealing with the fire were unable to talk to each other because MOD police and AWE’s own fire crew use radios on different frequencies. The report read: “AWE have their own fire ground radios which use a different frequency. This resulted in a delay in the sharing of communications at the outset. It is also reported that there were poor communications with MOD Police, which may have been overcome had we had the facility to communicate over airwave radio.”
And fire hydrants dotted around the base were described by the report as “inefficient” due to poor maintenance.
The report said: “On investigation by AWE, it was found that this was down to a mistake with the opening and closing of sluice valves by a maintenance contractor which has now been rectified.”
This meant a special fire truck had to be scrambled from London provide enough water to fight the flames.
Mr Burt said: “The fire required a major response from the Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service, which was unfortunately made more complicated by the inadequate numbers of staff on site, over-zealous security, and AWE's failure to maintain fire hydrant systems.”
AWE said the base followed standard procedures agreed with the emergency services.
A spokesperson added: “We are committed to learning all available lessons from the incident.”
