"My amazing escape from the carnage of Kuta"
Thursday, October 17, 2002
hongkong.scmp.com
ANNA HEALY FENTON
Sitting yesterday in his holiday home in Nusa Dua outside Kuta, the events of Saturday night were still raw for Richard Warburton.
It was 10.30pm when he headed for Paddy's, the themed Irish bar directly opposite the Sari Club, to meet an acquaintance, Mark, for a drink.
They had met over dinner with friends at the Bali restaurant Coup d'Etat the night before. "I'm 53, trendy bars like the Sari were a bit young and rowdy for me," said Mr Warburton, who has lived in Hong Kong for the past 18 years.
At 10.30pm he parked his hired Jeep in a side road just off the main Kuta bar street, Jalan Legian, where Paddy's is located.
The narrow street was choked with people and vehicles parked down one side, leaving only a single lane for traffic. The 8km from his holiday home, which he was in Bali renovating, had taken him more than an hour.
It was typical hectic Saturday night mayhem. The street-front bars at both Paddy's and the Sari were heaving, mostly with Australian and New Zealand tourists, the men in shorts, women in sarongs or shorts with bikini tops. Crucially when it came to protection from flying glass and flames, those without tops fared the worst.
Mr Warburton, who is from Leicester in the English Midlands and who supports Leicester City Football Club, was tired and had not wanted to go out but Mark twisted his arm. They planned to watch the England v Slovakia game on television in Paddy's. Unlike many of the tourists there that night, Mr Warburton is not a rugby fan.
Not finding Mark, he crossed the road to the Sari Club and, although normally a beer drinker, ordered a vodka and Red Bull to wake himself up. He chatted to an Australian at the bar about how peaceful Bali was, until the man, eyeing "a very attractive Australian blonde" across the bar, excused himself. The two men who had been talking to her were moving away.
"I'm going to take my chance and move in quick there," the Australian told Mr Warburton, who wished him luck. It was 10.50pm, about 13 minutes before the explosion that ripped the street apart.
Mr Warburton noticed his glass was empty. "That vodka and Red Bull saved my life - if I'd had my usual Bintang beer, it would have taken me at least 10 minutes longer to drink," he said.
He returned to Paddy's to look for Mark, noticing how crowded the disco was on his way to the toilet at the back. There was still no sign of his friend so he sat towards the front of the bar directly opposite the Sari. A waiter brought a drink and Mr Warburton bent down from his stool to pick up some dropped change. "It was notes and being the dry season in Bali and a bit breezy, it blew off the bar," he said, speaking to the South China Morning Post from Bali.
The blast just 10 metres away across the road blew him off the stool and smashed his glasses. His leg, stuck up in the air for balance as he lent down, was hit with shards of flying glass.
"There was a huge ball of flames, all the windows were blown out, immediately fire broke out at the back of the club and soon the whole street was in flames.
"I knew I was okay. I think I'd been shielded by a low wall around the bar between me and the Sari and all the people between me and the bomb," he said.
"Thank goodness it was my leg sticking up and not my head."
There were "arms, legs, bits of limbs flying through the air and glass, lots of glass".
He got out as fast as he could. The street suddenly plunged into darkness, and he dived down a side street to try to call his Brazilian wife, Marisa, and eight-year-old daughter, Camilla, at home in Hong Kong in Baguio Villas in Pokfulam. Unable to get through in the pitch darkness, he thinks he dialled his mobile wrongly.
He took 10 minutes to compose himself, noticing every building on the street was now ablaze.
"My first thought was it was a gas explosion," he said. "It didn't seem big enough for a bomb. I'd no idea how big it was, it seemed quite small, I'd no idea what carnage was waiting for me. It was so dark. I just thought it was dreadful that a few must have died. You couldn't see most of the people who were dying, they were trapped inside the discos. The enormity of it didn't hit me until later."
As he struggled through the stampede of fleeing, terrified holidaymakers, Mr Warburton was horrified when the first person he saw, lit only by the flames, was a man with one arm. "I tried to help him but he ran off. The second person I met was covered in blood but okay, just surface cuts.
"He said to me 'I think I'm dying', but I pulled off his T-shirt and wiped the blood off. He was okay. It was mainly coming from one cut above his ear. 'I think I've burst my eardrums,' he kept repeating, but I told him he really was okay."
Mr Warburton continued on, pushing against the tide of screaming people, naked or dressed in tatters, their clothes burned off. Many had hair on fire.
Finally, he reached a point 10 metres from the front of Paddy's. He was choking on the stench of "barbecued human flesh" but was determined to help. Without his glasses, he stumbled along in the darkness, tripping over bodies and slipping on blood.
"The ones that were yelling in agony or for their friends - I realised they were okay. It was the ones who were past screaming, they were the ones to look for."
The first person he tried to save was an Australian girl. Her clothes had been burned off, and her whole body was charred.
"Everybody who could was helping as we tried to find the girl's inhaler to help her breathe. She was asthmatic. She was gasping for air, desperately trying to get her breath, saying 'I'm okay aren't I? Tell me I'm not dying, tell me.' Then she paused, said 'goodbye' and was gone. She died in my arms."
With others, Mr Warburton tried to get bodies from the middle of the narrow street to the side and loaded on to a truck to allow emergency services through. They did not arrive for 40 minutes. "The street was blocked with burned-out cars and bodies," he said. "It took six of us to lift that poor girl on to the back of a truck that had managed to get through."
He turned to a man whose leg had been blown off, but it was a moment too late. He had no pulse. His friend, an Australian covered in burns, was on the ground, desperately trying to revive him.
Mr Warburton said: "He was kissing him, anything, everything, trying to get a response. 'Are you all right mate?' he kept saying. 'I love you, you'll be okay, you're going to be all right, hang on'."
But it was too late for both of them. "We tried to carry him to the truck, but he died as we were lifting him."
Even at such awful moments there was no time to linger. "We had to keep going, walking from person to person trying to see if they were dead, nearly dead or OK."
Mr Warburton cradled another two people, men terribly burned and beyond words, as they died. In all he saw 15 dead or dying people on the street that night.
He noticed not all the helpers knew what to do and some misguided people were flinging water on burned flesh, so he dashed into a shop, grabbed a pile of tourist T-shirts and draped them over the injured to protect them from the agony of more water.
The bedlam continued with naked, screaming people coming up to Mr Warburton shouting names in desperation: "Have you seen Buddy?" or the names of their friends or relations.
One of the bodies he found was the Australian who had gone to chat up the blonde woman. Her body he did not find, but doubts if she survived, being on the inner side of the Sari Club. "The Sari and Paddy's had televisions and discos at the back so anyone who was in there stood little chance."
Neither did the people drinking in the front bars who got the full blast. "The ones who survived like me, were in the middle, shielded somehow from the worst of it."
There was only so much Mr Warburton and the others could do. "We weren't firefighters, we couldn't go inside the burning disco sections at the back, all we could do was help the badly injured."
For two hours he and the others darted from body to body, struggling to make them out in the dark.
"Someone would shout 'someone over here' and we'd all go but we had to leave several where they were. You can't do anything for them when they are gone." Two hours had passed and Mr Warburton realised he couldn't take any more. "I was covered in blood, other people's, not my own. It was pointless looking for my Jeep, it was blown to smithereens. I walked a mile in the pitch black until I met a guy on a motorbike. I asked him to take me home."
On the way to his complex in Taman Mumbul they passed a medical centre, a beacon of light in the blackness. The motorcyclist advised him to go in. One glance at the mayhem inside and the degree of injuries he could see was enough to remind him he wasn't badly hurt. He continued home.
It was well after 2am when he got back and rang his wife in Hong Kong to reassure her he was okay. In need of a drink he stumbled into the bar at the Sanctuary Gardens residential complex, and his friends almost fell off their chairs.
"I'd forgotten I was covered in blood," he said. He dived into the swimming pool, the best thing to do since chlorine cleaned his cut legs.
Mr Warburton is still shaken but said he felt "fine considering", having had a few days to reflect on the events of Saturday night.
"I haven't slept very well since. The worst moment for me was that poor, poor asthmatic girl as she died in my arms.
"I can still hear the blast, smell the blood and the burning flesh and TNT.
"I feel bad that the whole emphasis has been slanted towards the Westerners who died when the Balinese have been just as badly affected."
Now , with a few stitches in the leg that was caught by the flying glass, he says he feels "the luckiest man alive".
"I wasn't religious before, but I think I might be now. Someone was looking after me on Saturday night. I don't think anyone else who was as close as I was to that absolutely enormous explosion got away without serious injuries." |
