Plumber’s shoddy work to blame for house blast

COURT: Bungalow was blown up after gas leak

A bungling plumber was yesterday found guilty of botching the installation of a boiler and blowing up a pensioners’ bungalow in a catastrophic gas explosion that trapped its occupants beneath the rubble.

Craig Hall, 35, left a gas pipe liable to come loose in Robin and Marion Cunningham’s home in Callander, Perthshire, by crucially failing to solder a vital 90 degree joint where it attached to the new equipment.

For eight months the dodgy fitting was held together by just a little paste used to prepare the joint for connection.

But eventually it separated, pouring gas at up to nine cubic metres an hour into the couple’s utility room.

Around 5.45 am on March 28 2013 the flammable atmosphere ignited, possibly sparked by a light switch, or the compressor on a fridge freezer, “totally demolishing” the property.

Mr and Mrs Cunningham were pulled from the wreckage by firefighters. Mr Cunningham, then 77, was taken by air ambulance to Glasgow Royal Infirmary with burns to his head, face, and both hands, and spent a full week in hospital.

Mrs Cunningham, then 74, had less serious injuries, but Stirling Sheriff Court was told she has been left “frail and very anxious” by what happened, while Mr Cunningham’s Parkinson’s Disease had “obviously progressed”.

Their daughter, Lynn Cunningham, 56, said that from leading quiet, independent lives, the couple had been made “dependent overnight” by the blast.

After a five-day-trial, Sheriff William Gilchrist took less than 40 minutes to find Hall, of Tullibody, Clackmannanshire, guilty of installing the combination boiler “otherwise than in accordance with appropriate standards and in such a way as to prevent danger”.

He said: “I’m satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the failure to ensure that the gas supply pipe was adequately joined to the gas inlet pipe had the consequence of allowing gas to escape, thereby causing the explosion.”

Hall in evidence, insisted that he had applied heat with his blow-lamp to solder the so-called “Yorkshire fitting” between the inlet pipe and the boiler, but accepted that the solder had not “run” and the joint had not been properly made.

Sheriff Gilchrist said heat could only have been applied “very fleetingly”, because not only had the solder in the joint not run, but even some of the flux paste, applied as part of the process, had not melted.

The court heard that it was this sticky paste that held the joint together and allowed it to pass a “gas tightness” test that Hall carried out before firing up the system.

Sheriff Gilchrist, who deferred sentence until February 7 for background reports, said he was not considering jail, but Hall could face a fine or a community-based sentence.

Daughter Lynn said her parents, now aged 79 and 81, had been “utterly overwhelmed” by finding, in their seventies, “everything that’s familiar suddenly disappears”.

She said: “They actually didn’t have the ability to put their lives back together again – it was too much.”

Craig Hall was found guilty of causing the explosion that destroyed the house.

The boiler is removed from the Cunninghams’ home in Callander. Picture: Mike Day.