Sam 7, p.14
SAM 7, page 14
‘We must get his children out,’ the doctor insisted. ‘If that man was alive they will be.’
If there was one thing that tore Melville’s soul apart, it was children being trapped and dying. At the same time going in again meant possibly breaking the foam cover and letting in the air that would enable the fire to spread.
‘Too dangerous,’ he answered tersely.
The doctor misunderstanding his reasons, shouted in his face.
‘If you won’t, I will.’
Before the doctor could move Melville gripped his arm so tightly that he winced.
‘You bloody will not!’
The imputation of cowardice had so incensed Melville that only ingrained discipline prevented him from punching the young doctor.
‘Cut the heroics. We want you at the hospital, not in it. When there’s fire we give the orders. Now get back.’
The registrar, his face showing the shock of what he saw, mumbled an apology. Melville relaxed his grip and spoke more kindly. ‘We all feel that way. If it’s any consolation the kids in there will have died of suffocation before they had time to be burnt. The flames take all the oxygen. At least it’ll have been over quick for them.’
During this confrontation the reporter was talking urgently into his transmitter. He stopped and made a comment to one of the leading firemen.
‘Tough job!’
‘Worse when the boss spreads the fire,’ came the unthinking answer, followed by a suspicious question.
‘Who the hell are you?’
‘Radio news.’
‘Get lost mate. We’re busy.’
The reporter retreated a moment ahead of the doctor, causing Melville to spot him.
‘Who’s that?’
The leading fireman shrugged his shoulders. ‘You were lucky to get out just now,’ he said.
Melville agreed silently. When this was finished and they were back in Greycoat Place Fire Station and he was going over the lessons to be learnt from it, he would in fact have to criticize himself. He had heard the fireman’s words and had little doubt that his rescue had made the fresh outbreak possible by disturbing the foam cover. The thought raced through his mind and was as rapidly relegated to later consideration. Forgetting the reporter, he began redirecting the hoses to hit the fire harder.
Plowden, the Chief Fire Officer, had been round on the outer side of the wreck when he heard the shout, ‘We have fire.’ This was far trickier than the concourse side to deal with, because there had been trains at every platform when the DC-10 came down and they blocked the firemen’s movements. The tremendous impact had not only squashed the coaches directly beneath, it had also knocked them sideways, derailing them and leaving them keeled over either against each other or against the platforms. Every carriage in the station had rocked on its wheels, even though they were many yards from the actual impact. Some passengers, instinctively heading for the concourse, had fought their way through the wreckage. Most had streamed out down the platforms, trying to escape up the steps to the nearer road bridge across the station, Eccleston Bridge. But the gates at the top of the steps had all been locked. For a few minutes the surging crowd of travellers had been in more danger from themselves than anything else, pressing the foremost wildly up against the iron gates, while others ran confusedly further along the platforms and would have jumped down on the lines had not Chisholm’s police constables been on platform 14 and maintained a semblance of calm until the keys were brought. Within twenty minutes every passenger who could walk had been guided out of every train, ambulancemen were using the Eccleston Bridge entrance to reach the injured, and a casualty post had been set up on the Bridge itself by a medical team from St Stephen’s Hospital in Chelsea.
Shortly afterwards a huge thirty-six-ton breakdown crane, mounted on rail bogies and accompanied by two tool vans, had reached Victoria from the Stewart’s Lane Depot, two miles away in south London. So had a diesel shunting engine, which could remove carriages without the lines having to be electrified again.
When the mechanical engineer in charge had presented himself to Plowden, the fire chief’s demand had been simple. He had gestured at the long rows of coaches. ‘How soon can you pull them clear? They’re a serious fire hazard with all this kerosene around.’
The engineer scarcely needed reminding. The suburban commuter trains occupying platforms 9, 10 and 11 were elderly stock, largely furnished in wood and they would burn easily. They had only one advantage. They were built on a solid chassis to which you could attach drag lines or winches even if the superstructure was smashed to matchwood. By contrast the main-line trains that had been drawn up in platforms 12 to 15, underneath the airliner’s main point of impact, were new steel carriages, built of integral construction like modern automobiles. Or, as the cynic phrased it, like baked bean cans. The damaged coaches had split open and might well have to be taken away piece by piece. But at least there was not so much combustible material in them.
‘We can uncouple the four-car sets at the country end and shunt them out,’ commented the engineer. ‘Some are derailed where they link with the damaged sets, but as far as I can see the buckeye couplings have all slipped okay.’
Plowden grunted, remembering from a rail crash study he had once attended that the buckeye couplings were designed to disengage under any up or down stress.
‘The faster you haul out of here, the happier I’ll be. I want this foreground clear.’
‘It’ll be a four to five hour job, jacking the overturned ones back up on to the rails. We’ll do our best.’
But by the time the fire started only twenty carriages out of fifty-two had been pulled away. Blue-overalled engineers were sweating to unscrew couplings that would release more, while others laboured with jacks and timber baulks to right those derailed. The firemen remained seriously obstructed, having to clamber over crazily tilted carriages to reach the further platforms, while debris and dangling roof girders further impeded setting up the hoses. The one thing they had plenty of was water from Victoria’s trunk hydrants and Plowden was using some of it to wash the kerosene down the drains that run between the platforms. Nor had he any lack of foam.
Within seconds of the outbreak Plowden confirmed over his radio that the divisional officer on the concourse should drive the fire away from the buildings. Any other action would put the Grosvenor Hotel and the neighbouring streets at risk. But it meant pushing the conflagration towards the one area that definitely held survivors pinned in the older, wooden-lined rolling stock, and where there might still be airline survivors from the rear of the aircraft.
At the same moment as Melville was making his dangerously brave rescue attempt on the concourse side, the grim-faced Chief Officer was watching the first of the Fire Brigade’s own casualties being brought out, scorched and overcome by fumes. There had been too many firemen deep in that wreckage, painstakingly dismantling it piece by piece to find the injured, for them not to suffer casualties. It was that kind of fire. Whatever had set it off – a spark from a hacksaw or simply a hot engine half submerged in fuel which finally brought the kerosene to flashpoint – it was bound to be a sudden inferno. The only way firemen could safeguard their own skins in such a situation was by not attempting to save others. Plowden reckoned there were very few men in the London Fire Brigade who would even think of that alternative.
A figure in a grime-covered raincoat appeared at Plowden’s side. It was Donaldson. He shouted in the Chief Officer’s ear.
‘The flight recorder. It’ll be in the tail.’
Plowden recognized him, but did not need reminding of the AIB’s importance. Nonetheless his answer was uncompromising.
‘People come first.’
‘There won’t be many left. How long to put this out?’
This was the question Plowden had been asking himself. When the British Airways Trident caught fire at Staines, also an appreciable time after crashing, the blaze had been extinguished in two minutes. But that was on open ground, in a field. Here there were other elements: bags of mail, roof timbers, the carriages, a hundred crevices and cavities where kerosene must be lying, ready to burn. Fire could even spread to the catacomb of storerooms under the thin floor of the concourse. It would certainly run down with the kerosene into the sewers.
‘Ten, fifteen minutes,’ shouted Plowden.
The noise and heat were overwhelming, foam hissing on hot metal, steam and smoke fouling the air. The sweat was streaming down Plowden’s face, streaking the dirt, making him look older than his fifty years. Donaldson himself felt he was being roasted alive. They were forced to move back. Suddenly in the midst of the fire a blinding, fizzing white firework of flame burst out.
‘Magnesium metal in the undercarriage, most likely,’ said Donaldson, more to himself than to Plowden. ‘Oh Jesus, we’ve got a job on.’
This fire was going to destroy so much evidence, so many clues to what had happened. Donaldson realized there was nothing he could do here. If anything he was in the way. Better to find out whether his engineering inspector had reported in yet. He touched Plowden on the shoulder.
‘Best of British luck,’ he shouted.
Plowden glanced round, jerked back from his renewed concentration on the firefighting, annoyed at the interruption. ‘We’ll find your ruddy black box,’ he said, dourly.
‘Thanks,’ said Donaldson, and thrust his way past relays of firemen out of the station by the Cartoon Cinema, where a poster, already curling and blistering, announced a ‘Funtastic season of cartoon comedies’. Injured firemen were being given first aid in the cinema entrance, while a photographer hovered behind, taking pictures. ‘To most of the public,’ Donaldson reflected bitterly, ‘this will be just entertainment too.’ Abruptly he realized that the accident, more than any other he had investigated, had created two worlds. In there, amidst the wreckage and the flames, enclosed by the station as securely as by the walls of a prison, a life and death struggle was being fought out by the firemen. In there, when they had finished, would still lie the riddle that he had to solve, the riddle of why the DC-10 had crashed, to which there could only be one correct answer, one truth, even if he never succeeded in finding it. Outside things would be different. Public interest, expanding as rapidly as the firemen’s foam, would be enveloping the whole situation, fed by endless rumour and speculation, by ministerial statements and television interviews and by the colossal sums of insurance money at stake. It would be the major spectacle Britain had to offer the world this weekend, since all the world welcomes a disaster. For a moment he wished profoundly that he was not at the centre of it. Then he braced himself and walked across Buckingham Palace Road towards the control point opposite the station in Grosvenor Gardens.
In the street it was as though the tumult of the fire had been curtained off, reducing it to a dull roar in the background, overlaid by the revving of ambulance engines and the wail of horns. Police constables were still escorting office workers away, firmly guiding them down a side street, ignoring their curious glances back at the scurrying stretcher bearers, and the huge, writhing, column of black smoke above Victoria, from which an oily sediment was falling on the whole neighbourhood.
As Donaldson walked along the side of the station before crossing the road to the control point in Grosvenor Gardens, he noticed a gang of three men tumble out of a small van and rush to a manhole cover on the corner. They wore blue overalls, thigh-length rubber boots and blue painted protective helmets like construction site workers. One began levering the square cover up from the pavement while the others fenced it off. Seeing Donaldson approaching they called out.
‘Keep away, sir, keep clear.’
In the same instant Donaldson felt the paving stones shiver. A thunderous belch of smoke and flame shot up from the shaft in the ground, just as the workman heaved the heavy cast-iron plate out of the way. A breath of foul smelling air wafted past. Further along the street another cover shot up with a bang, blown clear out of its seating. Mystified, Donaldson stepped up to the gang.
‘What on earth was that?’ he asked.
‘Kerosene’s burning in the sewers, sir, near enough exploded in the galleries, I reckon – and stirred up the silt too from the smell of it,’ explained the elderly, weatherbeaten foreman. ‘We were checking some brickwork along in Wilton Road when the first of it came down. Got out bloody fast, I can tell you.’
‘Mind if I look?’
Donaldson craned his head and gazed down the narrow shaft. Rusty iron footholds stuck out from the brick.
‘Eighteen feet down and a five-foot-six gallery when you’re there,’ commented the foreman.
‘Do all the drains from the station run into here?’
‘I don’t rightly know about what’s under the station. That’s the railway’s responsibility. We’re the City Council sewermen. But it does all run into ours at different places. And ours join the big GLC sewer. More like a river that is, pumped along at thirty knots.’
Donaldson cut him short.
‘But at one point everything washed out of the station will come into yours?’
‘That’s right, sir. And with the amount of water the firemen have been pumping down to flush that kerosene, there’ll be a quantity of junk with it.’
Donaldson glanced inquiringly at the man.
‘All sorts of things end up in the sewer, sir. Rings, jewellery, you’d be surprised. Used to be quite a sideline finding them once. But it’s dangerous. Stirs up the silt and the sewer gas. More than a few men died scratching in the old days, so it’s forbidden now.’
‘Who would authorize it then, a search I mean?’
‘The City Engineer, sir. He’s our boss.’
Donaldson smiled. ‘We certainly live and learn.’ The familiar excitement of discovery was making his adrenalin run. And, as often was the case, he did not know why, not yet.
His thoughts were quickly forced back to immediate issues. When he reached the group of control vehicles, he saw that a big, dark blue painted trailer had been moved into position, hauled by an articulated truck cab. He recognized it as a mobile police station. With luck its facilities would include a direct link to his own Information Room. At least if they were following standard air crash procedures it would. As he approached a constable stopped him.
‘Excuse me, sir. Are you on official business?’
‘AIB,’ said Donaldson, pointing at his armband with its royal crown. The constable, who was encountering a greater number of unusual officials than he had supposed existed, let him pass grudgingly. Around the group of control vans the air crackled with radio messages as ambulance, fire and police incident officers all kept up a clipped, urgent dialogue with their headquarters. Commander Thompson was standing outside the mobile police station, talking to a man whom Donaldson guessed must be another police officer, although he was in a city suit.
‘Has my engineering inspector checked in yet?’ Donaldson asked.
Thompson glanced up at him. ‘The duty officer inside should know,’ he said tightly, then checked himself and indicated the man with him. ‘Mr Donaldson, this is Mr Chance, the CID chief superintendent in the division. You’ll be seeing him again, I expect.’
‘David Chance,’ said the chief superintendent cheerfully, and shook hands. He was a young-looking forty with a strong, jutting jaw, a black moustache and a swarthy complexion.
‘Let’s hope there’s not much criminal to investigate,’ Donaldson replied, then added, ‘I don’t need to tell you that any eyewitnesses the police can turn up will be valuable, anyone who saw the aircraft at all. They don’t have to be experts. In fact it’s often better if they’re not. Experts throw in too many of their own conclusions.’
‘We’ll keep you posted,’ said Chance.
Thompson interrupted firmly. ‘Now, Mr Donaldson, if you’ll excuse us, we have a lot to discuss.’
Donaldson took the hint, and walked up the short step ladder into the trailer. Thompson’s assistant, Sturgess, was seated at a folding table with telephones and radio receivers behind. Donaldson explained himself and repeated his query.
‘AIB inspector, name of McPherson. He should have checked in by now.’
‘If he hasn’t, then he’s about the only official in London who’s failed to. That’s why we cordoned this area off.’
Sturgess consulted a log sheet on a clipboard.
‘In your line we’ve had two American diplomats, the local airline manager, someone from Hanson’s air accident branch . . .’
Hanson were the firm of undertakers who specialized in identifying and then disposing of the corpses from air crashes.
‘Are they setting up a mortuary?’ Donaldson asked.
‘He and the commander were talking about Chelsea Barracks. If the Coroner and the army agree, that is.’ Sturgess was still perusing his log.
‘McPherson. Yes, he checked in about five minutes ago. Can’t be far away.’
Donaldson paused, wondering why McPherson had not called him on the short-wave radio transmitter all the AIB inspectors carried. Maybe he’d tried but the buildings had blocked the transmission. He decided to contact his office before finding his colleague.
‘Have you fixed up a line to the Department of Trade yet?’
Sturgess stared at him, then picked up a bright red folder marked ‘Metropolitan Police Major Incident Procedure’ and flicked through the index doubtfully.
‘That’s a new one on me, sir. To be honest, we’re so busy we don’t have time to practise the procedures much. Major incidents don’t happen that often.’
‘Nor air crashes in Westminster, happily. Well take my word for it, you are supposed to provide me with communications. Can I use a line now?’
Sturgess agreed hesitantly and a moment later Donaldson was through to his information officer.
‘Thank God you’ve rung, Jim,’ he said as he heard Donaldson’s voice. ‘There’s a real panic on here. The Minister’s round our necks because the Home Secretary wants to make a statement in the House of Commons, the telex from Washington has hardly stopped and we haven’t a sausage to give either of them. What’s the gen?’
