Gas explosion survivor tells of lucky escape

Press, 11 May 1989, Page 6

Gas explosion survivor tells of lucky escape

PA Palmerston North An Apiti farmer, Hamilton Strahan, dropped in to the local garage on Tuesday to fill up his truck, pay his account and have a chat — the same sort of visit he has made many times.) What should have been a normal stop left him shocked and hardly able to believe he was still alive. Mr Strahan was only 10m from a gas cylinder explosion which destroyed the garage and left one man dead. He had wandered through to the workshop with the garage’s part-owner, James Nicholls, after filling up and paying his account. While Mr Nicholls went to wash his hands Mr Strahan “nosied around” the front of a tractor. At the other end of the vehicle another part-owner, Mark Harriman, aged 26, was about to light a* gas torch to cut some steel.

“I don’t think he even lit it. Jim (Mr Nicholls) saw him with his hand on top of the cylinder to turn it on and then there was no more. He saw me going through the air and I finished up on the edge of the building,” said Mr Strahan. “I looked up and saw a big flash of flame, like a fireball.” The garage outer cladding and roof were blasted up to 100 m away but Mr Strahan missed being hit. “It’s amazing. I couldn’t believe it.” Mr Strahan’s hearing was impaired in the blast and noise of the explosion could leave him deaf in one ear. “But if I hadn’t been bending down peering at something ... I just had my head down when the explosion took place ... It would have been very nasty,” he said. “You just don’t know when your day comes. I was extremely luckv.”