Northamptonshire Personal Injury
A TOP engineer who helped lead the development of Hesketh motorbikes in Northamptonshire had to be airlifted to hospital after he was caught in an explosion while working on a hovercraft.
Mick Broom was airlifted to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham for treatment to burns after the accident in Bengal Lane, Greens Norton, yesterday afternoon.
Neighbour James Shepherd-Cross rushed to the scene after hearing gas cylinders explode in the workshop where Mr Broom was working.
He said: “I was one of the first on the scene. I heard an explosion and saw black smoke coming out of the place, so I ran out there.
“The cylinders were still going off at the time. I knew the best thing I could do was to put water on him, so I put a hose on him and kept it on. It was awful.
“But the air ambulance and the paramedics were there incredibly quickly.”
Houses within 300ft of Mr Broom’s workshop were evacuated for 24 hours after the explosion and the fire service set up a cordon around the building because they feared more gas cylinders on the site could explode.
Northamptonshire’s chief fire officer, Martyn Emberson, was called to the scene along with 30 other firefighters.
He said: “The gentleman was doing some work on a hovercraft that was in the garage.
“What actually happened, we don’t know, but one of the garages is now just a burned-out shell and some of the cylinders that were in there have exploded.
“We had to set up the exclusion zone because we take gas cylinders very seriously. If they explode, projectiles can be blown over a very long distance.”
Mr Broom began working for Lord Hesketh at Easton Neston House in 1979 on a project to build motorbikes.
He worked as the development engineer for the company, which was originally based in Easton Neston’s stable block.
During three decades working on Hesketh bikes, Mr Broom estimates that he has built about 250 of the machines.
source: northamptonchron.co.uk
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