Horror as building collapses

Investigators were today still trying to establish the cause of a massive explosion which left 12 people in hospital - three seriously injured.

A gas leak is believed to have been the cause for the blast, but there was not believed to be any gas connected to a shop which was being renovated on the ground floor or flats above it.

The exact cause of the explosion is now being investigated by the Health and Safety Executive and police.

The explosion happened at the junction of Smithfield Road and Bridge Street yesterday morning.

A HSE spokeswoman said: "The Health and Safety Executive was made aware of the incident yesterday and is investigating. The HSE has visited the site this morning to begin preliminary inquiries."

Speaking at a press conference at Monkmoor Police Station today, Superintendent Martin Whitelegg, from West Mercia Police, said: "We are working with the Health and Safety Executive and they have taken charge of the investigation into the explosion in Bridge Street.

"They tell me a probable cause is a gas leak and they are investigating that as we speak. We will be looking to work with them on an investigation and open up areas of Shrewsbury as soon as possible.

"We don't believe gas canisters to be the cause at this particular time although the cause is still being investigated. We believe it's due to an escape of gas.

"We've spoken to both the owner of the premises and lease holders of premises in connection with the investigation and are looking at what was going on at the premises."

He said some renovations were taking place on the ground floor of the building, which was due to be turned into a restaurant. He said there was not believed to be gas connected to the building.

Mr Whitelegg said: "The cause of the explosion, the actual ignition is still under investigation. We're not treating this as a crime."

Last night fire chiefs said they were 90 per cent certain that nobody else was still in the property.

Today Mr Whitelegg said: "We worked with the fire service throughout the night and at the moment we have no reason to suspect there was anybody else inside the premises."

Emergency services have been praised for their efforts in dealing with the incident quickly. Mr Whitelegg also praised members of the public for their efforts.

He said: "There emergency services were at the scene of the incident within two minutes of receiving the call. I also want to praise the members of the public who helped. Some of them gave great assistance to people there."

He also thanked local people for providing refreshments for emergency services, including the King's Head pub in Mardol.

"It was a tremendous team effort. It's a case of the British pulling together."

National Grid today said its teams had been on site yesterday working to isolate a section of gas main in front of the building.

Tim Sneddon, head of environmental maintenance at Shropshire Council, said the authority was working to ensure that the town remained open for business as much as possible despite the disruption caused by the explosion, which has left roads closed and businesses left with a clean-up operation.

He said: "We've been trying to open streets up in and around the area. There is an investigation on and we will do that in a phased way. The Welsh Bridge and Bridge Street will probably remain closed for a number of days yet."

Tim Phillips, of Ditherington, and Ollie Parry, owner of the Salopian Bar in Smithfield Road, were among the first people on the scene. The pair rushed to help the casualties by removing rubble and debris from the collapsed building.

Mr Parry and Mr Phillips described how they plucked two women, believed to be in their 20s, to safety but had to leave a third woman as flames shot up 12ft in the air.

The men, along with several other passers-by, said they also helped lift a 4ft by 5ft slab which had fallen on a man who was going towards his vehicle in the car park of the Shrewsbury Hotel next door. Mr Phillips said the man's wife and two young children also appeared to have suffered injuries from flying debris and glass.

The 44-year-old said he had been drinking in the hotel when he heard a "massive" explosion. He said windows had smashed and bricks also came hurling into the premises due to the impact of the blast.

He said: "I heard this massive bang and then came out and tried to save whoever we could. We didn't know how many people were in there.

"There were kids, there was a bloke with a 5ft by 4ft slab on him, it was chaos. We lifted that off him to get him clear.

"We went around to where the flat was and pulled away the rubble to try to get the people out. I spoke to the one girl and she said 'am I badly burned?' I said 'you are burned but you are still alive'.

"We then tried to get another girl out. She was screaming and I had hold of her hand. But it then burst into flames and they were getting too high and too much that we just couldn't stand it.

"I would say the flames were about 10ft to 12ft." Mr Parry said most of the people inside the flat were still in their pyjamas.

He said: "I heard a bang and the building shook and I just sprinted down there. About 50 people were just stood there watching.

"Myself and Tim and two other blokes were the first on the scene. We pulled two girls out and we tried to pull out a third one but couldn't move the wall or ceiling that was crushing her.

"It got too hot and we couldn't pull her out. I think there were five people in the flat."

He said: "I could smell and could even see the gas coming up as I approached. It was getting stronger and stronger and then it just burst into flames. I have never seen anything like it."

"I heard people screaming but you can't just run off. You have to help, don't you?"

Angela Clemson was at the bus station in Smithfield Road when the blast ripped through the building in Bridge Street.

She had been in Shrewsbury that morning with her camera to photograph the riverside and was waiting to catch a bus home.

She said: "I was by the bus station when I heard a colossal boom and saw a plume of smoke. I thought there might be another explosion so I didn't rush round. My mind raced through all the things it could be and I thought it could be a terrorist bomb then I thought it's probably a gas explosion.

"There were people rushing in to help to dig people out. I saw them digging people out and a guy with a fire extinguisher doing his best.

"The building had collapsed and there was smoke. It was bursting into flames - it was so rapid. I saw a lady get dragged from her car and she had blood all over her face. All of the cars on the car park at the pub were flattened.

"From where I took photos a wrought iron window frame had been blown across the road. It was 100 metres across the road. I shook when I got home, I felt ill from watching it."

Fiona Walker, whose son used to live in the flat, said: "It sounded like a landmine explosion. It was really bad, it just went 'boom'."

She said she believed five girls now lived in the building.

"They are really nice girls. It's a really old building and in the freezing cold weather you don't know if a pipe might have cracked.

"When I heard the noise I just knew something bad had happened but I thought a restaurant had gone up."

People at the Shrewsbury Hotel at the time of the explosion said they thought the roof was caving in. They said there was rubble everywhere and the sound of screaming.

Robert Joys, of Coton Hill, has served as a soldier in Belfast but said the explosion was the biggest he had ever experienced. He said: "I was actually on the other side of the Welsh Bridge. I thought the tyres had burst on my van but it was the shockwaves from the blast.

"The glass completely blew out at the auctioneers, they had blown out across the road. Everybody on the bridge had to turn around, there were about 10 cars on the bridge at the time. Two young girls were in the firing line and they came running across the bridge in tears. They were telling everybody to get away.

"I saw a cloud of smoke. At first I thought it was dust, loads of birds were flying up into the air, then I would say about 30 seconds later the police were there. I have served in the Army in Belfast and been close to car bombs going off and they were nothing like what I experienced at the other side of that bridge."

Lee Lewis, of St Michael's Gate, said she heard a loud bang from her home and then saw the fire engines come flying out of the Shrewsbury Fire Station in St Michael's Street.

"It was really noisy and I knew something really major had happened."

Kitchen staff at the Bellstone in Shrewsbury were getting ready for the Sunday lunchtime rush when the building was rocked by the explosion. Head chef Richard Mumford, of Radbrook, ran out of the building and down Mardol to see what had happened.

He said: "Police, ambulance and firefighters were hovering around what was left of a building. A man was brought out, I am not sure whether it was from the actual building or from the rubble surrounding the building. They brought him out on a stretcher covered in one of the tin foil blankets, he looked in a bad way."

Michael Parsons, 22, chef de partie at the Bellstone, stayed inside the building after yesterday's explosion. He said: "It sounded like a really big explosion and the place shook, the fire alarm started going off and we could see smoke rising from above Rowley's House and people gathering near the building."

Vickie Warren, 29, of Castlefields, was shopping with her husband Tom in WH Smith in the town centre at the time of the explosion.

She said: "We heard the blast so we walked down Pride Hill and we could see black smoke. We could see smoke coming from a building, really thick, going up into the sky and there was rubble all over the road outside the Morris building. Among the rubble there was fire on the road.

"The police were there in minutes and then the air ambulance arrived."

Walkers in Shrewsbury's Quarry heard the blast and stood still along the riverside as smoke billowed into the air from behind the spire of St Chad's. Many people began running towards the church to see where the smoke was coming from. Others immediately rang family members who lived in the town centre.

Ambulances, incident response units and unmarked police cars were lined up along Smithfield Road as the emergency services worked at the scene near the Shrewsbury Hotel.

An air ambulance which landed in Frankwell car park was not needed and flew out of the town shortly before 1.30pm as shoppers hurried back to their cars.

Jill Box, manageress at the Kings Head pub in Mardol, said she had set up a comfort room for people affected by the incident, including emergency services, to have refreshments and keep warm.

She said: "I heard the explosion and was in the kitchen at the time. It was a really, really loud bang like our gas boiler had gone off. We went and had a look to see if we could lend a hand and have been giving tea and coffee to anybody that needs it."

Ilana Devane, owner of Timothys of Shrewsbury, a lighting shop in Mardol, was contacted by the next door kebab shop owner shortly after the explosion happened.

She said: "She was telling me that there was a big bang and that the windows suddenly broke in her place. I told her not to worry but she told me that all of my windows had broken.

"All the windows in my shop are broken and I can't go to see the damage.

"It was difficult to get into town but I managed to find a place to park.

They couldn't tell me how many windows were broken and I've not been able to look.

"I had a very good day in the shop Saturday for sales but presumably a lot of stock has been broken. We are insured and I'm still alive and healthy." She said she had been at the shop for almost 17 years and it had been flooded in the past, with water up to the knees.

John Leach, a 62-year-old retired health service engineer of Darwin Gardens, was working outside taking Christmas lights down when he heard the explosion.

He said: "There was a tremendous explosion. It was obviously far too big for a car back-firing and there was a vibration with it.

"It literally shook the ground and we are about a quarter of a mile away. I went upstairs in the house and I could see smoke coming from the general direction of Barker Street.

"I got there probably 10 to 15 minutes after it happened. I walked across the Welsh Bridge and police told me to get back because they were closing off the area.

"There were bricks across the road and it looked like the whole part of the building where the explosion was had collapsed.

"There was a tremendous amount of smoke.

"There was a massive convoy of ambulances coming in and out by the time we left about half an hour later."

Stewart Harbord Suffield, a 66-year-old retired freelance technical journalist from St John's Hill, was also at home when the incident happened. He said: "It rocked the houses in St John's Hill. I grabbed my camera and went down to the scene. I was there probably within a minute or so. The fire was well developed and producing a lot of black smoke.

"I was obviously concerned whether anybody had been injured. It looked as though the whole of the front of the building had collapsed across the street.

"I was amazed at how quickly emergency services were there. They were remarkable."

Brian Curran, a 67-year-old from Monkmoor Avenue, was just paying for a car parking ticket in Barker Street to get photographs developed in the town when the explosion happened and was one of the first on the scene.

He said: "I was putting some money in the machine and heard an almighty bang. We looked around the corner and I took some photographs before the police came across and told me to move in."

Zeki Celebi, 40, who owns the Star Kebab House in Mardol, said all of the windows in the property, including the living quarters upstairs, had been blown out.

He said a second hand Volvo S40 car he had bought only a week ago had also been flattened by falling rubble in the car park of the Shrewsbury Hotel.

His son Ahmet, 16, a student at Shrewsbury Sixth Form College, said it was fortunate the curtains had been drawn inside the premises as it protected the family from flying glass.

He said: "I was asleep in bed. At about 11.30am we heard a bang and my dad thought it was something in the shop.

"I thought it was a bomb or something and I came running down the stairs. I have got two little brothers, one is three, the other five, and they started crying and my mum was crying.

"We saw lots of flames and could see it was the flat next to the Shrewsbury Hotel."

Shops in the Mardol area of the town suffered damage with smashed windows at places including the Relate Charity Shop and Topcats bar.

Richard Kennedy, manager of Topcats, was opening to clean up when the blast happened.

He said: "Next thing I knew I was on the floor. It just threw me forward. I looked up and the window had shattered. I thought Id been shot.

"I heard screaming and shouting and ran to the corner. I made sure the emergency services had been called, but a lot of people had already done that."

Catherine Roche, 28, of Frankwell, was at home with her boyfriend Simon Hogg when they heard an explosion and the house shook.

She said: "I was in my bedroom and the entire house shook, the windows were shaking and the loft hatch fell down. It felt as if something had hit the house. My boyfriend went outside and saw smoke billowing from around the Welsh Bridge. The emergency services seemed to be arriving within seconds. It was really quite scary."

Steve Cocliff, of Coton Hill, Shrewsbury, described the scene in Bridge Street as "absolute chaos" following the explosion.

He said: "There were quite a few people injured, a couple were children. It was chaos, absolute chaos.

"We were stuck in traffic trying to go through the town and I had my camera with me so I went and took some pictures. There was debris all the way across the Welsh Bridge."

Ollie Parry, from the Salopian Bar, said his parents had felt the impact of the explosion as far away as the Shelton water tower.

Homes in Frankwell and The Mount also shook.