‘I feared I wasn’t going to make it out of there’
MUM ON ‘TRAUMATIC’ ESCAPE FROM UNDERGROUND TRAIN STATION FIRE
ANORTH Wales woman caught up in a “traumatic” station fire says she thought she wasn’t going to make it out as she was surrounded by thick smoke.
Jen Rowlands, 55, from Rhostryfan, was waiting at Liverpool Lime Street station for her train back home a week last Saturday when a cloud of smoke came rushing though the tunnel.
Ms Rowlands, who was with her daughter Ela, described the experience of being surrounded by thick smoke while three floors underground as “traumatic”.
The mother-of-four, who suffers from claustrophobia, said she was initially in a state of disbelief as “everything changed within a matter of moments”.
The “overwhelming” experience left her in need of help to get out of the station, and her daughter had to help carry her out of the station.
“I actually thought at one point that I wasn’t going to make it out,” she said.
“I was surrounded by people and, once I thought about being three flights of stairs underground, I began to panic.”
Within a few minutes, a thick cloud of smoke engulfed each floor of the train station.
As they made their way out up the escalators, the smoke began to thicken.
“The smoke would get thicker the higher we got, and by the end it was so thick we couldn’t see the escalators,” said Ms Rowlands.
“Meanwhile, the alarm was ringing and there were announcements on the tannoy saying that the station was being evacuated.
“It was scary.”
Ms Rowlands said her 14-year-old daughter looked after her during the evacuation and essentially carried her up the stairs.
“I could only breathe properly when we got outside,” she said.
“I don’t know what I would have done if my daughter wasn’t with me. She carried me up the stairs and reassured me. You can hear her in the video.”
Ms Rowlands said she is “still a bit shaken” from the experience and still recovering from what happened.
She said a previous experience “definitely played a part” in the way she reacted to the incident in Lime Street.
While she was away with her family over Christmas 15 years ago, her house was set on fire in an arson attack, causing significant damage and leaving most of the contents “burnt to a crisp”.
Although she was not at the scene when it happened, seeing the house in its burnt state left an impression on her, and she said this played on her mind in the aftermath of her ordeal in Liverpool.
“I think it definitely affected my reaction to what was going on in the station,” she said.
“I might not have been thinking of it at the time, but I’ve seen the devastation that fires can cause and I was probably thinking about it on a subconscious level.
“That coupled with my claustrophobia made the entire experience all the more intense for me personally.”