“My daughter left home with a pretty face and her face is swell up now with burns all over.”
This was the agonising reality Michelle Hernandez experienced as she watched her 28-year-old daughter, Sherlene, lying in the Accident and Emergency Ward of the Port-of-Spain General Hospital with burns on her face yesterday.
Sherlene was in the kitchen at the El Pecos restaurant at Royal Palm Plaza, Maraval, when an explosion rocked the bottom floor of the building. She was one of 11 people who were injured in the blast.
“My daughter face swell up. They had to cut off her clothes. Skin is falling off the side of her face,” Hernandez bawled as she waited outside the hospital for further information about her daughter.
Hernandez said her daughter is a mother of three and had worked with El Pecos for 12 years.
Father of two, Noel Buccoo, an employee of El Pecos for eight years, was working in the kitchen when the gas tank exploded. He received burns to his head and was thrown through a glass door during the explosion.
His sister-in-law Germillia Marryshow said Buccoo was luckily not to be in as serious a condition as other people she saw in the emergency ward.
“There are people in worse condition in there. There was this woman whose face was totally burned away from the side of her face.
“Another woman, her skin was dropping off of her body. Her skin was falling off her hands. It was looking real bad. There were people who did not get major injuries and there were others who got burned all over their hands and face and back,” she added.
The woman said although she was not involved in the accident, she said from the looks of the injured people no amount of money could compensate for their wounds.
“It was not nice just seeing this. Knowing that your whole face just burned away. No money could compensate your face,” she said.
Marryshow said her brother-in-law told her that he would not go back to work at El Pecos after this incident.
Amile Joseph, 24, was working next door to El Pecos in Hurry Curry when the explosion occurred. She initially thought it was a bomb but soon realised it was an explosion.
“As soon as I got up to go and serve somebody, all I saw was a set of glass explode. I was feeling real scared.
“I did not know what it was. I just ran outside. I thought it was a bomb or some kind of thing. I was so scared. When we went outside we saw people coming out from El Pecos badly injured,” Joseph said.
Although Joseph said she was relatively uninjured, one of her co-workers, who she identified as Laverne, hurt her leg and she was at the hospital for treatment. Joseph said even after the incident she was still “out of sorts” and scared.
Another woman, her skin was dropping off of her body. Her skin was falling off her hands. It was looking real bad.