Plumber guilty of causing huge blast by botching gas pipe soldering

TIM BUGLER

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.

Nine nearby houses had to be evacuated.

Mr and Mrs Cunningham were pulled from the wreckage by fire-fighters. 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”.

After a five-day trial, Sheriff William Gilchrist took less than 40 minutes to find Hall, of Tullibody, Clackmannanshire, guilty of failing to properly install the combination boiler. 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.”

He deferred sentence until February 7, saying he was not considering jail, but Hall could face a fine or a community-based sentence.

Hall’s advocate, Susan Duff, said she would reserve her speech in mitigation for that hearing.

Prosecutor Shona McJannett described the blast as “a whoosh” that had blown out the complete outer walls of the timber-frame property, in Murdiston Avenue, Callander, causing its roof to collapse into the void.

Lynn Cunningham, a high school English teacher, said her parents, now aged 79 and 81, had been “utterly overwhelmed” by finding, in their 70s, “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.”

Jodi and Mal Willsher had a young daughter.