It was the worst nuclear disaster in Britain, but it is probably that you have never heard of it.
In contrast to Chernobyl in Ukraine, or Fukishima in Japan, the wind schedule in Cumbria is not lively in the public imagination.
And that is because the full size of the fire that broke out in 1957 on the nuclear site that was now known as Sellafield was covered by the government, although it led to dozens of cancer cases.
Atomfall, a video game that was released at the end of last month, puts users in a imagined post-apocalyptic version of Cumbria, a world where the windscal fire has turned a lot from Northern England into a lawless quarantine zone.
But the real thing could have been so much worse.
A local trade union leader went so far that the consequences could have been as bad as Chernobyl's disaster in 1986, had attempts to make water work on the fire.
On October 10, 1957, a fire broke out in the windscal nuclear power plant in Cumbria. Above: employees in protective overalls in the immediate aftermath
Atomfall was made by the Oxford-based company Rebellion, which is best known for its Sniper Elite series.
CEO Jason Kinglsey told the BBC that he got the idea for the game based on the windscale fire when he walked in the Lake District.
The game shows a large part of North England as a lawless quarantine zone, in an alternative universe where the consequences of the fire were disastrous.
Mr Kinglsey said: 'It went pretty wrong in real life, but it was checked.
“It was a good disaster, but it did not cause strange glowing plants or mutants or dangerous creatures.”
Windscale was opened on the site of a Munitions factory in the Second World War in the late 1940s. It was the first nuclear complex of Great Britain.
It was set up to produce plutonium for the Nuclear Weapons program of Groot -Britain.
In 1956 Calder Hall Nuclear Power Station opened next to it to produce electricity for millions of houses.
The fire began on October 10, 1957, in No. 1 of the twin posts', or reactors, on Windscale. Boven: an original Daily Mail image
An employee pours milk into a container after fire. Milk from diaries in a radius of 30 miles from the plant was removed discreetly to prevent it from ending up in stores
Employees on the site after the fire
The fire began on October 10, 1957, in No. 1 of the twin posts', or reactors, on Windscale.
It burned 50 hours before it was discovered and lasted three days to bring under control.
It was caused by heat structure in the reactor after a series of safety blunders.
The reactors had a graphite core with uranium bars. They were air -cooled by two 410ft chimneys.
The decision to set up the Koelans after the raised temperature in the reactor was noticed, the situation was even worse by helping to give the flames.
The substitute work manager of Windscale, Tom Tuhy, risked his life by inspecting the destroyed reactor and putting water on it.
The last decision was reportedly loaded with risk.
Cyril McManus, an ex-command and local trade union leader, said Book Sellafield Stories in 2012: 'He was put in there and if things had gone wrong with the water, it had never been tried before on a reactor fire, if it had exploded, Cumberland would have been ready.
Atomfall was made by the Oxford-based company Rebellion, which is best known for its Sniper Elite series
The game shows a large part of North England as a lawless quarantine zone, in an alternative universe where the consequences of the fire were disastrous
A scene from the new game with a well-known red telephone box set in the midst of the post-apocalyptic landscape
A RAF helicopter loaded with instruments to rest radiation levels, flies near the wind bowl after the fire
A sign ordered employees who had been near the reactor who found a fire to report for monitoring
'Blow to forge. It would have been as Chernobyl. '
Other efforts to turn off the fire – including the use of scaffolding poles to try to push the burning fuel cartridges out of the core – initially failed.
At the early hours of 11 October, more than 10 tons of uranium were on fire.
Tuohy then ordered that the ventilation system was switched off and that the cooling fans would also be stopped. He hoped to starve the fire of oxygen.
Although the fire was eventually extinguished, escaped polluted air through the 400ft-high chimney of the plant and rose over the Lake District.
Radioactive particles eventually fell in the local countryside and were also blown further inland to Wales and over the sea to Ireland.
The authorities hoped that the full extent of the accident would never become public knowledge.
But in the days after the fire, reports from government scientists emphasized cases of cows in the Lake District district that are infected by eating grass covered with radioactive dust.
Milk from diaries in a radius of 30 miles from the plant was removed discreetly to prevent it from ending up in stores.
However, a delivery of grassmere in the Lake District did appear in the food system.
Instead of announcing the blunder, the government of Harold Macmillan kept the truth secret to prevent the locals 'unnecessarily alarming'.
Macmillan ordered a wider cover-up about the fear that the British people would be against nuclear energy if they discovered the accident.
He was also concerned that his attempts to rebuild Anglo-American relations after the SUEZ debacle of 1956 would be sustained if the incompetence of the nuclear industry was revealed.
The government ensured that the official report of the fire brigade blamed the negligence and failed instrument.
And ministers then sealed the article for 30 years.
The consequences would have been much worse if filters were not installed on the chimneys on the wind schedule during their construction.
The installation of the filters was demanded by Nobel Prize -winning physicist Sir John Cockroft, who led the project.
At that time, however, the filters were known as the follies of Cockroft because they were considered a waste of time and money.
It turned out that the filters save lives.
The reactors on the wind schedule were closed after the fire brigade and the production of plutonium were moved to an extensive Calder Hall instead.
In 1982, a report was issued by the British National Radiological Protection Board 32 dead and at least 260 cancer cases could be attributed to the fire.
In October 1993, two people who fell ill lost with leukemia after the windscale fire lost their four -year battle for compensation.
A judge said there was a lack of evidence to support the idea that radioactive emissions caused their illness after the fire.
The disaster in the wind schedule at level five on the international nuclear and radiological event scale (Ines).
The scale – which runs from 1 to 7 – classifies the severity of nuclear -related incidents.
Only two events have earned the top tank of Seven – the 1986 explosion in Chernobyl and the disaster in 2011 in Fukishima.
