Lancashire explosion: Neighbors in disbelief in deadly explosion that killed young child and injured four | UK News

Neighbors in bathrobes and slippers. Even after almost 12 hours there is an air of disbelief.

Police, fire crews and ambulances are still at the scene of Mallowdale Avenue, where a suspected gas explosion killed one child – George Arthur Hinds, two years old – and injured four people, two of them seriously.

The sun is shining on the broken tiles littering the ground.

Looks like there has been a hurricane, but residents of adjacent Bowland Street are pondering the aftermath of a gas explosion.

“I was woken up by a loud bang,” one resident told me. “It looked like a bomb went off.”

He guides me through his property to the back garden, which is full of debris from the explosion. Tiles, insulation and wood chips.

“It rained vertically on us,” he says.

The fire and rescue services are still searching the properties at the center of the explosion in which two houses were razed and one badly damaged. Only the chimneys remain standing.

There is rubble everywhere, cars with broken windows, and a police cordon separates the badly damaged from the slightly damaged.

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Emillie Downie, 18, was still awake at 2:40 a.m. when the explosion occurred.

“It was massive lightning and then the houses were shaking. We thought it was an earthquake, but we live near a power plant, so we thought it could have been that, ”she said.

“It was maybe the loudest bang I had ever heard, you knew it was a …