I dropped my change - it saved my life in Paddy's bar
Richard Warburton considers himself the luckiest man alive. Had he not bent down to pick up dropped change in the bar where he was sitting, he would have been hit by the full force of the bomb that ripped apart a packed strip in Kuta, Bali, on Saturday.
Instead of being dead or gravely injured like everyone around him in Paddy's bar, he has only surface shrapnel wounds.
In the split second that he picked up the bundle of notes, he was shielded by the bar as others around him perished, some torn limb from limb.
Mr Warburton, 53, told his story to the South China Morning Post yesterday.
'I'd just bent down to pick up some notes blown off the bar when the bomb went off,' said the oil and petrochemicals consultant who lives in Pokfulam with his wife Marisa and eight-year-old daughter Camilla.
The blast blew him off his bar stool and smashed his glasses, leaving him with shrapnel injuries to his leg. 'Thank goodness it was my leg sticking out and not my head,' he said. 'There were arms, legs, bits of limbs flying through the air and glass, lots of glass.'
He spent the next two hours stumbling through the darkness, trying to help those who lay screaming in agony on a street clogged with bodies, debris and burned-out cars. Access for the emergency services was blocked for 40 minutes, he said.
Four people died in his arms that night. The first person he tried to save was a young Australian woman. Her clothes had been burned off and her whole body was charred.
'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 OK aren't' I? Tell me I'm not dying, tell me . . . Then she paused and said 'goodbye' and was gone.'
With others, Mr Warburton tried to clear bodies from the middle of the street to the side to allow emergency services through. 'We were slipping and sliding on blood - it took six of us to lift that poor girl on to the back of a truck that had managed to get through.'
