Terrible Gas Explosion.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 2, Issue 293, 15 March 1881, Page 2

Terrible Gas Explosion.

(Overland Mail, Jan. 14). A terrible explosion occurred in Glasgow while a number of families were celebrating the New Year. A large quantity of gas, which is supposed to have come from a broken main pipe, having accumulated underneath the flooring of the ground flat of a house in Henderson street, a comparatively new district in the north-west quarter, William M‘Culloch, an occupant of one of the houses, obtained the assistanc of two police constables and a neighbor named Hugh Reid, a gas-fitter, to see where the escape was. While they were thus employed the gas ignited, and there was a tremendous explosion, followed by two lighter ones. The bodies of William M'Culloch and Hugh Reid were soon found amongst {he ruins, but life was extinct. The mother of Hugh Reid, who had coipe from Kilmarnock to visit her sop, was afterwards found and removed to a neighbor’s house; but she afterwards died. Reid’s little girl, Jennie, aged four years, was carried out and taken to the Western Infirmary, and she died in the afternoon ; while his wife, who was only found after she had been embedded in the ruins for nearly eight hours, died the same evening, making in all five deaths. The houses are so shaken and torn that they had to be propped up, and upwards of twenty families have been made houseless, no fewer than eight having lost nearly all their furniture besides.