charlie's Journal: Exploding bus shelters

Weird.

For the past couple of months, I've been tsk-tsking about the number of bus shelters and phone boxes around Edinburgh with broken glass and empty windows.

Then, this evening ...

Karen, Claudio, and I were on our way to a pub. It having turned cold, we crossed over Leith Walk to wait at a bus stop (for either a bus or a passing taxi). We were just approaching the bus stop when there was a loud pop -- and a sheet of glass about one metre by two disintegrated, dumping its advertising board all over the pavement, along with several kilos of toughened glass (reduced to fragments).

To say we were shaken is a bit of an understatement; if we'd been under the shelter it would probably have been call-an-ambulance time. There was nobody else within a hundred metres, though, and no other witnesses: this thing just exploded in front of us!

Talk about unpleasant surprises. It had been quite windy earlier, and the temperature had dropped about ten degrees (celsius) in the past three hours, and on our way back we passed a number of glass-free phone boxes, including one that had clearly broken really recently, as there was still glass on the pavement. Best guess we can come up with is that some of the toughened glass the Council are buying to put in their shelters is not suitable for low temperatures or high winds, but it's still alarming to nearly be on the receiving end of a face full of glass fragments.