Huddersfield pie factory inquest hears: Oven went 'off like a bomb'
Nov 5 2010 Huddersfield Daily Examiner
A MAN working in a Huddersfield bakehouse was killed when the oven he was using exploded “like a bomb going off”.
David Cole was hit by the oven door with such force that he was flung across the bakery at Andrew Jones Pies on Old Leeds Road.
Firefighters found him crushed underneath the concrete ceiling, which collapsed in the huge blast on April 10 last year, an inquest was told.
Tearful wife Susan and the rest of Mr Cole’s family heard the harrowing details at Bradford Coroners Court yesterday.
Mr Cole, a 37-year-old father of two, lived in Salterhebble, Halifax.
He was one of six people working in the Jones’ factory on Good Friday in 2009.
Before the explosion, two ovens stood side-by-side in the factory and each were loaded with 1,400 pork pies every hour throughout the day.
The blast brought down part of the roof and started a fire just after 5am.
One of the first witnesses at the hearing was Mr Cole’s colleague Marcus Cartwright, who told how he broke his back in five places in the explosion.
He was knocked unconscious and lost all memory of what happened in the explosion.
He later woke up in Leeds General Infirmary, where he spent the next seven weeks undergoing operations.
Factory manager Christopher Parks, from Lindley, said Mr Cole had told him the oven wasn’t working and he had gone into the office to ring an engineer to come out and fix it.
