A FORMER Hereford security guard was hailed a hero after he saved the lives of two Australian tourists while he was backpacking in Sri Lanka.

The tourists from Albany in Western Australia were buried alive when a mudslide caused the building they were staying in to collapse.

Jerry Powell, from Hereford, dug the pair out from the building in the town of Ella with his bare hands, and said it was a miracle they had not been crushed and killed.

Mr Powell, 45, said: “I was walking home from the pub on my own in the early hours and some local guy came running down the street and he said, ‘Can ‘you come and help my friends? They’re stuck’.

“I thought there might be people stuck in a tuktuk in a ditch as it was raining, but there was a house which had collapsed in a mudslide. It sobered me up pretty quick.

“I could hear a few voices and a few muffled screams below it. Once I started pulling some rocks and rubble out I saw a hand sticking out. “I wasn’t sure what we were going to find. I grabbed his hand. I was the only English speaker there as everyone else was Sri Lankan and the couple were Australian so I was able to talk to them and reassure them.”

Mr Powell, who quit his job to go backpacking last year but is now back living in Whitecross, was spending three months in Sri Lanka when the landslide happened on December 20. He has spoken of the rescue now that he has returned home.

He said he was expecting anyone who was inside the house when it collapsed to be dead.

“Luckily, the roof was a big concrete slab so they got trapped in a small void, if they were anywhere else other than bed they would have been dead,” he said.

“The rest of the house was completely flat. They weren’t actually pinned down by the rubble but after we pulled the stuff away they were just too scared to move, thinking it was all going to come down on top of them.

Mr Powell, who used to play rugby for Hereford RFC and helped with the clean-up at Wyeside after the February floods, said: “It was a miracle as there’s no way they should have got out of that.”

He left soon after he rescued the two tourists, who were travelling with a third person. They were taken to a nearby hospital but Mr Powell was unable to find out how if they suffered any serious injuries.

He was eventually able to track them down after contacting an Australian newspaper. He found out that while two had escaped relatively unscathed, one of the party had fractured his spine in four places.