FAMILY GASSED

Greymouth Evening Star, 21 January 1926, Page 2

FAMILY GASSED

BABY ALONE ESCAPES. Five people were gassed, and four others injured in an explosion which wrecked a house in Fabian Road, Fulham, London. Fire broke out in the cellar immediately after the explosion, and the flaming gas from the exploded meter made it difficult for the firemen to prevent the spread of the outbreak. One of the firemen tried to rescue an Irish terrier trapped in an upstairs room, but the dog viciously resisted, and had to be left. Later, when the danger from gas and fire had passed, it was brought down by its mistress. Mr J. Hughes, who, with his wife, occupied one of the upstairs rooms in the wrecked house, said that his wife

wakened him about 6.30 complaining of a strong smell of gas. “I got up to waken the landlady, Mrs Shepherd, and outside our door I stumbled over the dead body of the cat, which had been gassed. Mr Florence, tenant of the ground floor flat, went to the gas company’s offices, while Mrs Shepherd, Mrs Florence, my wife and I shut ourselves in the kitchen at the back to escape the smell. We were still there when the gas men were at work. “Suddenly there was a terrific explosion. The door came flying across the room, knocking Mrs Shepherd under the table, and falling on top of my wife. “The rest of us were pitched to the far side of the room. The floor heaved up, the front of the house fell outwards, the kitchen wall bulged out, every window in the house crashed to splinters, and doors all over the place flew off their hinges. “Mrs Florence was caught by some of the masonry and glass, which cut her face and head.” Strangely enough, none of the occupants of file wrecked house suffered from gas poisoning. Those who suffered were the family of Mr Phillip Robert Melvin, who lives in the adjoining house, and the only one to escape altogether was the nine-days’-old baby. Mr Melvin said that after being wakened by his wife he found his little girl, Margaret, aged 3g, unconscious. “I carried her to the'balcony, ” he said, “and there I thrashed her. It is the first good hiding she has ever had, but it brought her round. When I went back to the children’s room I found Joan, who is 11 years old, lying on the floor unconscious. “I called to her aunt, Miss Maclachlan, who lives downstairs. She came up the stairs very unsteadily, and as soon as she reached the room she collapsed also. “While I was attending to both of them my boy Phillip went for the doctor, and he collapsed on the way. My wife and other son, Ronald, were ill, but the baby, lying in the perambulator-, was not affected at all.”