Journalists at a Midlands daily had an explosive start to the New Year when they pulled together a special 6am edition following a major gas blast.

On Sunday morning emergency services were called to a scene of carnage in Shrewsbury town centre after the blast had ripped apart a building and blown a woman into the street from her first floor flat.

The blast, which left 12 people injured, could be heard for miles around and was the biggest emergency to hit the town since the 1992 IRA bombing of Shrewsbury Castle.

Within minutes reporters and photographers from the Shropshire Star were on the scene and filing breaking reports for shropshirestar.com while staff at the Telford HQ put together yesterday’s special edition.

Print and web journalists worked through Sunday afternoon and night to prepare the 6am special, which had a print run of 8,300 copies and was in shops in time for the Monday morning commuters back at work for the first time in 2010.

It contained six pages of news and analysis alongside an eight-page pullout of photos from the scene.

The Shropshire Star’s companion website clocked up more than 137,000 hits during the day and by early Sunday afternoon there had already been over 80,000 page impressions with locals flocking for online coverage of the story and to view the picture gallery.

Traffic figures for yesterday were the website’s best ever, with a total of 203,249 hits.

Deputy editor Jon Simcock said: “It was a terrific effort all round. As usual, our staff responded brilliantly to the call, giving up a large part of their Sundays and in many cases working through the night to ensure we hit our deadline.

“The response from our readers, too, was amazing. Within minutes, we had pictures from the scene, eye witness accounts and even video footage, to complement the words and images from our own people on site.”