The neighbour of a seven-year-old boy believed to have died from inhaling toxic fumes during severe flooding has said fire officers warned him he might have breathed in deadly hydrogen cyanide gas and have just 20 minutes to live.
Ian Berry told an inquest he was awoken in the early hours by two fire officers at his home in Chertsey, Surrey, to be told Zane Gbangbola had died and that Zane’s parents, Kye Gbangbola and Nicole Lawler, had been taken to hospital.
Berry told Woking coroner’s court that he was later asked by a police officer not to talk to the media. He said the officer told him: “We don’t want to scare public and I’d ask you not to mention the hydrogen cyanide.”
For two to three weeks after Zane’s death, Berry said, “people in biohazard suits with respirators on their backs” were working at the schoolboy’s home.
Zane was found lifeless in bed in the early hours of 8 February 2014. His parents believe he may have died from inhaling hydrogen cyanide gas that seeped into their home in floodwater from a nearby lake on a former landfill site.
The inquest has heard that a competing theory is that he may have died from carbon monoxide poisoning.
Berry said fire officers woke him and his girlfriend twice that night, on the first occasion to tell them some neighbours had fallen ill, though they were vague about possible causes, and then again to tell them Zane had died.
On that second occasion, he said, “they [the fire officers] told us that they had made various tests and it was because of hydrogen cyanide coming through, to which I knew the word cyanide, but not the other thing.
“The fire officer said that it was serious and that if we had inhaled it, potentially it was in our system and it would be fatal within a period of 15-20 minutes. We were told to wait in our house.”
He said he then searched online for information about hydrogen cyanide. It was “one of those defining moments”, Berry said, as he and his girlfriend sat exchanging telephone numbers of who to ring “in case something happens”.
He told the court: “We just calmly sat until 20 minutes had quietly passed. We just sat, and after that period of time we got our waders on and walked up to the top to see what was going on outside. It seemed to be quite urgent, and then almost less so.”
He, a number of neighbours, two police officers and two fire officers were taken to hospital for tests, Berry said. “We wanted to make sure we were safe from everything.”
At the hospital they were “asked some generic questions about how we were feeling”. Berry said he told the medics he felt unwell, which he now put down to food he had eaten earlier, and said “I was put in a separate room and they locked the door.”
Berry said he kept asking the doctors what they were being tested for. “One of them was for blood gases and it was a relatively painful injection, even the policeman winced a bit,” he said.
Once given the all-clear, Berry was told he could return home, but he said he and his girlfriend were “too nervous because we didn’t know what was going on”, and they booked a room at a local pub instead,
So worried was he after the event, Berry said, he had wanted to fit a gas membrane at his home, but it was too expensive. Even now, he told the coroner, “it is still a worry, because as soon as any water comes, even a puddle, I will just leave the house and take the cat with me and go to a hotel.”
The Surrey coroner Richard Travers has said the fact that Zane died from toxic fumes is unlikely to be contested, but a contentious issue may be which gas was responsible.
Zane’s parents, both environmental engineers, had been using electric pumps to clear their flooded basement, but on the day of Zane’s death they had hired a petrol-driven flood pump as a contingency in case they lost their electricity. They have told the inquest they had not used that pump but had set it up ready to be used.
Berry was asked by Alison Hewitt, counsel for the inquest, why he had mentioned carbon monoxide but not hydrogen cyanide in his police witness statement taken within hours of the incident.
Berry said the firefighters may have mentioned carbon monoxide on the first occasion they woke him up. He said the police officer who took the statement had condensed a one-and-a-half-hour conversation into a two-page document.
He said he was “crystal clear” that firefighters had warned him about hydrogen cyanide on the second occasion they woke him. He had “100% recollection”, he said. “If someone tells you you’ve got 10-15 minutes or whatever to live, it focuses the mind.”
Questioned by Chris Coltart QC, representing Surrey Hire and Sales, from whom Lawler hired the petrol pump, Berry said he had discussed the inquest with Lawler.
Asked by Coltart whether he believed that Zane had died from inhaling hydrogen cyanide, Berry replied: “I saw, for two or three weeks afterwards, people in biohazard suits with respirators on their back coming in to the property a number of times. If it was carbon monoxide, why would you have that level of protection?”
The hearing continues.
