5000 Evacuated As Google UK HQ Roof Garden Catches Fire

Employees at Google’s UK headquarters in London were evacuated, after a fire broke out at the top of the building on Buckingham Palace Road at lunch time.

It took four engines as well as 20 firefighters to extinguish the blaze, which was related to barbecue. As many as 5,000 Google staffers and other people on the sixth floor of the building were evacuated. 

However, a small patio area on the fifth floor of the building was also affected, according to London Fire Brigade.

Within few minutes of the incident, the workers in the nearby buildings started posting images of the blaze on the microblogging website Twitter. A Google spokesperson notified that no one had been injured.

Along the same line, the spokesman said: “We have free food for staff at our offices and today was a barbecue day. We were having a barbecue on the patio where the fire started. There was no serious damaged to the building and thankfully no one was hurt. We're all back in the offices now.”

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The fire was controlled within a few minutes, but the smoke was continued to be here for some time as firefighters were finding it difficult to reach the source of the fire from a raised platform. 

Our Comments

Had this incident happened elsewhere, it wouldn't certainly have garnered so much publicity and nearly 40 articles from some of the biggest national newspapers in the UK.This shows, to some extent, the importance of Google in the eyes of the media. Also the Telegraph reports that 5000 people were in the building, surely that's 500.

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