Catastrophe in Cyprus – Huge explosion on military base

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I was today in the morning without internet and called Kai to hear if there is everything working. He said “Joar, internet is working. But did you hear that with the power plant already? We had a total power cut because the main power plant got blown up!”… :-o “What?”

So, after the internet was back, I was looking on all news pages for information about it. So, the power plant itself doesn’t explode by itself. But seems like 2 container with ammunition on the military base next to it (close to Zigi/Mari).

Krankenwagen und Feuerwehr vor der Militärbasis

According to the newspaper the container caught fire and blow up. The shock wave was so huge that debris hit and destroyed windows from cars on the near by highway (Limassol – Larnaca) and insured even the driver.
Also the villages around got bombed by debris (splinter, metal sticks and whole roof parts) and houses got partly heavily damaged. And also the near by main power plant of the island got damaged and it imminent a shut down of the whole plant.

Eyewitnesses say it looks like after a bomb attack.

At least 12 people got killed in the disaster and at least 30 got insured.

The container itself remain from an confiscation, under pressure from US, in 2009, when they found an illegal ammunition transport from Syria to Iran. Since then the 98 container with ammunition are stored on the military base. And 2 blow up now last night. Not to think about what would have happened if all – or at least more – would have been exploded.

Update:
As we can read now at http://www2.onthisisland.com/cyprus-power-outage/2011/07/11/, are all 98 container exploded. The damage on the power plant is enormous (there is also a link to pictures from BBC… looks really bad).
The flags are on half mast and an terrorist attack is not excluded at the moment.
The link above is a live ticker. All new information will be published there.

I didn’t really heard anything here in Limassol. Actually I just fall a sleep a bit before. But it was the whole night strange foggy. Maybe a forerunner.

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