Car explosion escape ‘lucky’

Press, 22 June 1989, Page 7

Car explosion escape ‘lucky’

PA Nelson An elderly woman whose car exploded in her garage an hour after she had parked it says she is lucky to be alive. Miss Pearl Hosking, aged 67, picked her car up from a Nelson garage bn Tuesday and drove it home. On the way she noticed a smell in the car.

“I smelt something on the drive home, something different from usual but I didn’t know what so I just locked it up and left it,” she said yesterday.

An hour later the car exploded inside the garage, which is built into the house. “At 6 o’clock there was a mighty explosion... I saw a glow on the back wall of the garage and knew that it was on fire,” Miss Hosking said. She rang the Fire Service and got fellow occupant Miss Anna Beck, aged 77, outside.

Miss Beck was taken to a neighbour’s house because she thought she was having a heart attack. She was taken to Nelson Hospital but was later discharged. Miss Hosking moved another car from an adja-

cent garage and played the garden hose over the smoke from the fire. Walls between the garage and house were “burning hot.”

Two engines from the Nelson Fire Service put out the blaze and firefighters were at the scene for an hour.

Miss Hosking said the car’s muffler had been serviced in the afternoon. “They were welding, it must have been a spark.”

She said she was not angry with the garage. “I just praise God we were protected and no-one else was injured... I’m thankful that it didn’t do more damage.” The manager of Gibbons and Greenam, Ltd, the garage which serviced the car, said there was nothing wrong with what had been done to the car, a 13-year-old Hillman Avenger. “I don’t know what caused the fire. We were doing some work on it but there’s nothing suspicious about it. I don’t know why it exploded. It could have been an electrical fault. We don’t know. There’s a lot of ifs,” he said.