FIREBALL HORROR: “I opened the kitchen door… next thing I knew, I was on the floor,” Pierre Kuma recalls

A true burn survivor, Pierre Kuma has shared the chilling details of the gas explosion that left him fighting for his life.

Speaking to Kafui Dey, Pierre carefully retraced the routine that preceded the accident, an ordinary sequence of events that makes what happened next even more haunting.

The day had started with a little planning. An okra stew he had prepared days earlier had been taken out of the freezer that morning to thaw. By midday, sometime between noon and 1 p.m., he stepped into his kitchen to warm it.

Before that, he had taken a break from work to pray for about 30 minutes, a routine he maintained even on busy workdays.

“I had been dealing with clients and interacting with people at work,” he recalled. “At the back of my mind, I was also waiting for someone who had travelled to Aburi to text me when he was on his way back.”

When his prayers ended, he headed to the kitchen. “I put on the gas. Everything was fine,” he said. “I turned on the lighter, turned on the stove. There was a clean blue flame.”

Then his phone rang. The call was coming from the hall. Thinking nothing of it, Pierre left the kitchen to answer. After speaking briefly with the caller, he walked back.

What happened next unfolded in seconds. “The kitchen door was closed,” he said. “I opened the door and I just saw fire come on me.”

He still remembers the terrifying image with remarkable clarity. “It was a blue flame with a bit of orange around it, and I heard this sound,‘voom”, Mr. Kuma recalled.

For a brief instant, it was as if a wall of fire had exploded towards him. “It faced me straight,” he said quietly. “I still remember how it looked.”

Then his memory ends. “I don’t remember a feeling,” Pierre said. “I just remember seeing it, and then the next thing was me getting up from the floor.”

The moments between the explosion and finding himself on the ground remain a complete blank. “Between seeing it and whatever got me to the floor, I have no memory of it,” he said. “I’ve never had any memory of what happened in between.”

He paused before describing the permanent gap the accident has left in his life. “What I have recorded in my mental hard drive,” he said, “is ‘voom’… and then I’m getting up. I don’t know how I got to the floor.”

Years later, Pierre can still replay the sight of the fire in vivid detail. But the few critical seconds that changed his life forever remain locked away, lost somewhere between opening a kitchen door and waking up on the floor.