Charleville truck explosion: Police officer surprised to find driver alive after massive blast

THE cop was sure all at the scene of the Charleville truck blast were dead until he saw a figure wrapped in a blanket blink and heard the last six words he ever expected.

Charleville Accident

CONSTABLE Kenric Head was certain everyone was dead until he saw a figure lying wrapped in a tattered blanket blink and heard those magic words: “I have got a f---ing headache.”

It was just after 10pm on Friday and 29-year-old Constable Head had just seen one of the most extraordinary sights in his career.

A massive flame had shot in a thin, vertical column hundreds of metres into the western Queensland sky as he was racing to the scene of a truck accident on the Mitchell Highway, 30km outside Charleville.

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Constable Kenric Head next to the fire truck which was first on scene after a truck rollover on the Mitchell Highway.

The explosion, fuelled by ammonium nitrate spilt from the truck, was described by Ryan Brogden, principal inspector of explosives in the Natural Resources Department, as the most powerful in Australian transporting history.

The sonic waves that swept towards Constable Head’s patrol car less than 1km from the scene were described as a “kick in the chest”.

Const Head understood what was happening. A Charleville Police Sergeant had been on the scene earlier and reported a Kenworth carrying the potentially lethal load of more than 50 tonnes of ammonium nitrate had driven off a bridge into a creek.

While Constable Head drove towards the scene, that same sergeant was being pelted by massive chunks of concrete from the bridge as he frantically tried to exit his patrol car from a run-of-the-mill accident scene which had turned into an exploding munitions dump.

One piece of concrete, weighing about 250kg, had flown through the air to land on the road 350m away, gouging open a large section of bitumen.

Both Const Kenric and Senior Constable Mark Everett teamed up with a sergeant about 500m from the site, set up a basic command post and convinced the more senior officer not to accompany them back to the accident site.

Constable Head and Constable Everett walked towards the explosion site in pitch black, the fires smouldering in the creek but shedding no light on a scene that included the remains of the Kenworth, two fire trucks and up to seven people not accounted for.

Constable Head understood the deadly combination that is ANFO (ammonium nitrate mixed with fuel and oil). That was the power Tim McVeigh unleashed in Oklahoma in April 1995 outside a federal building, killing 168 people.

The two officers decided to risk it anyway.

“You just do that sort of thing as a police officer – we all do that sort of thing,” he said.

A block of concrete from the bridge landed hundreds of metres from the blast site.

Two firefighters on a truck before the bridge had been blown metres away from the site, two more in a second truck behind had been flung into their back seats.

Both police officers were unsure if the first blast had exhausted the fertiliser, or whether there was about to be another one.

The driver of the Kenworth, who had crawled from the cabin after the accident, was lying on the road wrapped in a tattered blanket and Constable Head was certain he was dead.

“Then he blinked,” Constable Head said. “We tried to talk to him about the footy but he didn’t follow the footy. But he did sort of joke with us, saying, ‘I have got a f---ing headache’.”

The two officers got the firemen, the critically injured truck driver and the assisting truck driver to the command centre.

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