Hampshire News
Race to help burns victim
5:00pm Sunday 12th February 2012
“DO NOT touch me because I’m burning.”
Those were the words uttered by a victim of Sunday’s gas explosion in Basingstoke as she approached a neighbour.
The neighbour was Ieva Brivule, 27, who was in her garden cleaning a table when the explosion happened in the kitchen of a nearby house in Abbey Road, Popley, at around 9am.
A 53-year-old woman, named locally as Susan King, remains in a specialist burns unit at Salisbury District Hospital after the blast. Her condition is descri-bed as “satisfactory”.
Miss Brivule said the first she knew anything was wrong was when she heard the shouts of the injured woman’s son.
She said: “He was saying that his mum had got burned and that she needed a shower. I said over the fence that I could help.
“The lady came into my garden. She had a burn on her face, her trousers were torn and she had skin coming off her fingers. I tried to help her to walk because she was walking very slowly. She said, ‘Do not touch me because I’m burning’.”
She added that at that moment they heard the sound of an ambulance so the injured woman left her garden.
By yesterday morning, 14 out of the 16 households evacuated following the gas leak had been allowed to return home. Many residents stayed for at least one night in the Premier Inn, at the Basingstoke Leisure Park, while others stayed with friends.
Among the first to return were Esther Taylor and her husband John.
Mrs Taylor, 65, told The Gazette: “We all got a big fright and the family affected are in our thoughts and our prayers. They are really nice people.
“It has not really been an inconvenience – it’s more a case of feeling sorry for the people involved.”
David Lawrence, 51, an engineer for British Airways, was in his kitchen in Abbey Road when he heard the explosion. He said: “I didn’t know what it was – it was too loud a bang to be a car crash.
“I took my wife to work and when I came back they told us we had to get out. Unfortunately, we didn’t know it would be for at least 24 hours so we left with what we had on.”
Engineers from Southern Gas Networks have been working at the site to find the cause of the gas leak. On Tuesday, they used a digger to widen a hole dug outside the front of the house where the explosion occurred.
On Sunday, the explosion was thought to have been caused “by a gas leak in the drainage system leading to gas being contained in the walls of the house”.
Laura Varney, spokeswoman for Southern Gas Networks, said the investigation into the cause could last several weeks.