My main hobby at the time was SCUBA diving. I was the Scottish Sub Aqua Clubs National Diving Officer and as such, was responsible for all the SSAC training and diving in Scotland.
On the night of the Pan Am 103 disaster, I was at the Dumfries and Galloway branch to introduce a new item of training.
Towards the end of the session, I received a request on my pager to contact the hospital where I worked as the Blood Bank Manager.
The Cumberland Infirmary Carlisle’s (CIC) critical emergency plan had been activated, and all the designated departmental heads had been called in.
Before I set off back to Carlisle, I contacted other senior lab staff and asked them to call everyone in.
Normally, the journey from Dumfries to Carlisle would take about three quarters of an hour, but on that evening the main roads and especially the motorway were quite deserted. I felt I had a good excuse to ignore the speed limits, and as I had at that time a relatively high performance car, a black Ford XR3i, I made it to the hospital in what I remember as between 20 and 30 minutes.
The sheer emptiness of the motorway was very disturbing. Normally traffic was almost continuous but on this occasion both north and southbound were completely empty, the police having closed the motorway. Mine was the only car on the motorway.
Upon arriving at the hospital I contacted the regional headquarters of the National Blood Transfusion Service in Newcastle, 60 miles from Carlisle, to arrange for additional units of blood, platelets, and fresh, frozen plasma (as pre-arranged in the regional emergency plan) to be “blue-lighted” to us.
We then just sat around awaiting the influx of casualties. It had been decided that it would be quicker to transfer them to the CIC rather than the Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary as we were straight down the motorway from Lockerbie.
The blood arrived from Newcastle, couriered by two teams of police cars within 40 minutes, if memory serves. Northumbria police could not cross the boundary to Cumbria in this sort of case, but the usually excellent cooperation between forces did not let us down—quite excellent, as the Northumbria force had to traverse Newcastle itself. I personally think the police loved these emergency calls to blue-light blood.
We did not receive any casualties, and I think the Royal Infirmary admitted only three or four minor ones—burns I think.
Sadly, all the casualties we expected were dead.
Subsequent to that night, I received a phone call from a contact I knew in the Cumbria Police, asking, if necessary, would I be able to put together a team if the official recovery teams were overloaded, to search for bodies or body parts that may have fallen in the lochs near Lockerbie. I arranged one dive in a loch with another diver who would not be overly distressed by any significant find. We did not find anything.
Now, I travel north to visit friends about once a month, and I cannot pass the site of the disaster without remembering the ghastly hole in the ground adjacent to the M74 North, the smell of burning, and the smell of fuel.
I had only an insignificant role in the catastrophe, and yet it all comes back passing the reconstructed town.
How much worse for people who lived through the night and following days and the relatives of all the casualties.
