Marlon Vickerman, Features Writer

On the eve of Christmas, 1985 when Jacqueline got her shopping out of the way and decided to take a breather along Premier Plaza, Constant Spring Road, she anticipated just watching the Yuletide crowd passing by.

She is a craft vendor, but she was not peddling her leather slippers that night. She was just enjoying the moment with her year-old son sitting on her lap. She knew very little that less than 20 feet away from her was the making of both a miracle and a national catastrophe. The disaster was the 1985 gas cylinder explosion that killed more than five people and severed the body parts of dozens more. The incident caused injuries to persons standing up to 60 feet away. The miracle, Jacqueline and her baby were untouched.

"It was about 7:00 pm that night and I was sitting out here, in front of Krazy Jim (now Photo Express) with my son in my lap. Just a little farther from where I was, I saw two men blowing up balloons, but I wasn't paying them much mind," she said.

"But then, some people started shouting at them because it seems the cylinder they were using to pump the balloons was overheating and they were throwing water on it to cool it down, then, by the time I took my eyes off them I heard 'woom!'"

Body parts scattered

By the time her ears stopped ringing and she opened her eyes, the cylinder was gone, but smoke, shattered glass, blood and body parts were scattered all over. The cries of agony and shock that followed were deafening and the sight was unbearable. "Beenie dead, Beenie dead!" This was the shout that she remembers most to this day. 'Beenie', she said, was a man who was assisting the other two with inflating the balloons, and who even hurled expletives at the crowd that was shouting at the men earlier.

"When I looked, both (Beenie's) legs were blown off," she recalled. "There was one nurse lady in particular that I felt really sorry for because she was getting off a bus to go to work when the explosion chopped off one of her legs. Even a Rasta man that was there lost his head, it flew as far as to where the Mutual Life bank was."

When her mind, and the thick smoke that surrounded her had cleared, Jacqueline dashed to the Bustamante Hospital for Children because her son was acting 'funny' after the explosion. Checks revealed that he was fine and both mother and child walked away from the national tragedy, practically unscathed.

Chased away before blast

'Clive', another craftsman who was close by at the time of the explosion, said the two men operating the 100lb cylinder were chased from the vicinity of the Jamaica National Building Society earlier before the explosion.

"The man dem was blowing up de balloons down in Half-Way Tree but the people dem run dem weh from down there because the sensation (smell) that was coming out of the cylinder wasn't pretty. People did a wonder a what kind of gas dem did have in deh mek it smell so," Clive said. "I hear that dem bring the cylinder come up to Premier Plaza and it start overheat and dem a throw water, beer and all sort a things on it to cool it down but a so dem throw it, a so it steam off until it just blow up like a bomb."

After the incident, it was revealed that the cylinder the men were operating was not filled with helium, a colourless, odourless, tasteless gas normally used to inflate balloons, but a hydrochloric acid-based gas, which possibly led to the explosion.

Her son is now 24 years old and Jacqueline is glad to be alive and in one piece, but she is still frightened by even the mildest of sudden, 'booming' sounds. As for the cylinder operators, one died on the spot while the other is blind and allegedly mentally challenged.

marlon.vickerman@gleanerjm.com