Family avoid disaster in air con explosion

A family has told how they were seconds from disaster after their portable air conditioning unit caught fire and exploded.

Gregory Lawless woke up at home in Milton Keynes at about 02:50 BST to find the unit on fire in the upstairs hallway.

He unplugged it and dragged it downstairs, away from his sleeping wife and 10-year-old son, before taking it outside on to the drive, where the compressor exploded.

His wife, Ainsley, said she feared that if the unit had still been inside the house when it exploded, the "top floor would be gone".

Gregory said: "I just did what I'm sure any parent and partner would do. I saw the flicker of a flame and I heard a beeping from the unit, and just ran as fast as I could to get the unit out of the house.

"I couldn't believe the timing, that it exploded moments after I got it into the drive."

The family called their escape a "miracle". They had moved the unit into the hallway at their home in Oakridge Park only that night because it had got cooler. Before that, it had been kept in a room where their son had been sleeping on a blow-up bed.

The device was about five years old and the company that made it closed after going into liquidation last year.

"There's nothing wrong with our electrics," said Ainsley. "They're all perfect. We clean the filters all the time – my husband only a couple of days before had hoovered the filters out."

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