Injured still rattled by mall explosion

Wu Quangang, a 41-year-old security guard, still feels panic when he recounts the terror in the wake of the natural gas blast on Thursday.

Wu Quangang still feels a surge of panic when he recalls the deadly natural gas explosion that ripped through Mo’erma Shopping Mall in Luzhou, Sichuan province, on Thursday evening.

"Everybody was bleeding from the head and I was terrified,” said the 41-year-old security guard．

Wu had worked in the mall, the busiest in Luzhou with an area of about 20,000 sq m, for four years.In this time, however, he had never seen anything like the blast last week that killed four people and wound 40 others.

Now, sitting on his bed in the Hospital Attached to Luzhou Medical College on Sunday, he was recovering from injured to his left hand, his head, and his nerves.

＂Natural gas supply had been cut off for three days to install new pipelines. That night, workers from the natural gas company were in the mall to supply it with natural gas after the pipelines were laid. Natural gas leaked in the process,” Wu said.

He said he asked workers to turn off the valve of the pipelines and opened the door to ventilate the basement where the pipelines were. An estimated 10 minutes later, the lethal blast was announced by a deafening roar.

"A woman standing at the entrance to the mall was pushed to the opposite street by the shockwave and she suffered severe wounds in her brain. She is still in a critical condition,” said Gu Yingjiang, a neurosurgeon at the Luzhou Medical College Hospital.

Chen Zhenggang, a 55-year-old taxi driver, was approaching the gate to the mall with three passengers when the blast took place．He said an object pierced the side window of his taxi and struck him in the head.

"I thought a major earthquake had jolted Luzhou,” said Chen, from his bed in the orthopaedics　ward of the same hospital.

Gu Yingjiang, a neurosurgeon in the Hospital Attached to the Luzhou Medical College, visits the blast injured. (www.ming7.cn)