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A British man narrowly survived a violent explosion at his workplace.
KEYSTONE
A fireball, cardiac arrest, and five weeks in a coma: A British worker survived an explosion with severe burns. Today, he’s cycling around the UK with his dog for a good cause.
Leigh Taylor still remembers exactly the moment his life exploded. The 45-year-old father from England was working at a brewery in May 2024 when a container became pressurized during tests on a distillation plant. Then it exploded—and a fireball erupted.
“I was completely surrounded by fire,” Taylor later recalled in the *New York Post*. The explosion hurled him across the room. He remained conscious, heard sirens, saw his hands—and immediately realized how bad it was. “The skin was hanging down like in a horror movie.” At that moment, he thought: “That’s it.”
Taylor was flown to the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle with severe burns—and placed in an induced coma to give him any chance of survival. About 40 percent of his body was affected by burns, primarily his face, hands, and legs.
For five weeks, his body fought for survival. During that time, Taylor suffered a cardiac arrest. His heart stopped for eight minutes, then the doctors brought him back. Taylor’s family later wrote in a fundraising appeal that they had been told he was, at times, the “sickest patient in the hospital.”
For Taylor himself, the pain was the main thing that remained after he woke up. Skin was taken from his back and upper body and transplanted onto his hands and legs. “The pain was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced,” he says. His airways were also injured because he had inhaled fire and smoke. To this day, he struggles with the consequences.
And yet Taylor was lucky in his misfortune. His eyes remained unharmed. The skin on his face did not need to be transplanted—partly because the air rescue team quickly fitted him with a protective mask. “I’m lucky to be alive, to be able to see, and to still have my face,” he says.
After his physical rescue came the next challenge: carrying on with life. Taylor had to learn to walk again, regain mobility, and cope with pain, scars, and fear. Above all, however, one question kept haunting him: Why did I, of all people, survive? “There was no logical reason for it,” he says. Others would have called him lucky. He puts it differently: “It’s a miracle.”
This thought gave rise to his new project. Taylor sold his car, gave up his apartment, and launched “Paws & Pedal”: With an e-trike and his dog Taco, he plans to travel the entire length of the British coast. He often finds places to sleep with people who follow his story. His goal: to raise funds for the air rescue service and the hospital that saved him.
So far, Taylor has cycled along the coasts of Scotland and Northern Ireland, raising the equivalent of about 11,000 Swiss francs. By October, he plans to complete the coasts of England and Wales as well.
