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Originally Posted by JIMBUNA

1944 4,000 shells detonate in RAF arms depot at Fauld, near Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire; village of Hanbury destroyed, at least 70 people killed.

R.A.F. PHOTO OF POST-BLAST CRATER

There had been staff shortages, a management position had remained empty for a year, and 189 inexperienced Italian POWs were working in the mines at the time of the accident. In 1974, it was announced that the cause of the explosion was probably a site worker removing a detonator from a live bomb using a brass chisel rather than a wooden batten. The RAF Fauld explosion was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history and the largest to occur on UK soil.

THE BOMB STORE AS PAINTED BY WAR ARTIST DAVID BOMBERG
<In February 1942, however, he was invited to paint an underground bomb store at RAF Fauld in Tutbury near Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire. Sited in a disused gypsum mine, it was one of the largest stores of munitions in Britain with a capacity to hold up to 20,000 tons of high explosives. 'I was a bit fearful,' his wife Lilian later remembered, 'when I learned David not only got lost among the bombs, but I knew how curiously he climbed, slithered and slid among and over the piles to get the angle and form of interest' .... Bomberg spent two weeks at RAF Fauld making numerous oil studies and drawings of the bomb store. He completed the paintings once he returned to London, submitting four drawings with one large and two small paintings to the WAAC. Although the bomb store series is now regarded as a high point in Bomberg's career, the WAAC considered the works too innovative and accepted just three drawings. The committee did not commission Bomberg again, and declined his offer to work on a large mural painting of the same subject.
Lilian Bomberg's concerns about the safety of the mine were proved disastrously prophetic when, on 27 November 1944, RAF Fauld accidentally blew up. The detonation of a single bomb ignited 3500 tons of high explosives, the largest explosion ever recorded on British soil. Sixty-eight people were killed and tremors were felt as far away as Southern Europe. https://www.wikiart.org/en/david-bomberg/bomb-store-1942