10th anniversary of Sheppey Crossing crash
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00:00 In all honesty, the best way I can describe it is like a scene out of a Hollywood movie.
00:06 All you see was just chaos.
00:09 There was people coming out of the fog, there was vehicles and shapes looming out of the fog.
00:15 Still to this day, the biggest road traffic collision I've ever attended in my career.
00:19 Never seen it again, I particularly don't want to.
00:23 [Music]
00:26 It was quite evident that it was abnormally thick, the fog.
00:40 So much so that within a short while you lost all sort of sight of other cars and things around you.
00:55 And you was just enveloped in a thick fog.
01:00 Very foggy morning and I thought to myself I'd best slow down and keep my distance.
01:06 Then we come to a stop, didn't know why, I hadn't heard anything or seen anything.
01:13 I mean I could only just about see the boot I think of the car in front of me.
01:17 Then people were walking up the middle of the two lanes telling us to get out the car.
01:24 And then we walked down to the bridge and I was just like gobsmacked to all the different crashes that we passed.
01:35 The updates were coming through on the radio. I think the first update was one of chaos.
01:41 It was clear that it was a very foggy morning. It was very foggy, lots of people couldn't see.
01:48 There were reports of 10 vehicles and it became 20, then it became 30.
01:54 And I was still on my way. Actually by the time I got there, it stretched the whole length of the bridge.
02:01 And that's the best part of Le Mans.
02:04 And we're sitting again 30 cars, that's quite a big incident.
02:07 You get closer, they said this is now going up to approximately 150 cars.
02:11 So it's quite daunting when you first arrive.
02:15 Dozens of people have been injured in a crash involving more than 100 vehicles on the Sheppey crossing.
02:21 It happened in fog on the A249 carriageway heading from the Isle of Sheppey towards Sittingbourne just before 7.30 this morning.
02:29 Couldn't particularly hear a lot, but you could see people just going into, you know, just breaking and going into the back.
02:37 There were lots of lorries that had jackknifed and obviously had crashed.
02:44 My first instinct was to brake.
02:50 I braked and I managed to stop without going into the back of anybody.
02:57 And then I suppose it was just really the matter of a second or two you made the decision, what do I do?
03:04 Do you stop in the car and wait for perhaps another lorry to run into the back of you, which you could see in front was happening?
03:13 I thought I'll get out the car and just go forward to relative safety, which would have been, you know.
03:23 And I got out my car and as I started walking forward alongside the Armco barrier there,
03:32 it was a camper van, I think, just smashed between my car and the Armco barrier and just run right over the top of me.
03:43 And that's pretty much really all I remember because it wasn't until or at least two hours later that I was actually, you know, got from under the van.
03:59 I can sort of remember coming to and what had happened was I thought that I'd lost my leg because I can remember saying,
04:11 "Oh, I've lost my leg, I've lost my leg."
04:14 And my left leg, my foot was up right alongside my ear basically, so I thought my leg had come off, you know.
04:24 I couldn't really feel any pain.
04:28 And I think the fire brigade must have been there and they eventually got me out from underneath this van.
04:38 And then I can remember the ambulance guy saying, "Look, if we don't straighten your leg," he said, "you're going to lose it."
04:48 But he said, "It's going to hurt."
04:50 And I can remember having to pull my leg to straighten it.
04:54 And I can remember digging my fingernails into the tarmac.
05:00 I expected it to be a significant incident and that was down to the amount of 999 calls that we'd received.
05:06 So I was advised by our emergency operations centre that there was call after call after call coming in.
05:12 And that generally lends itself to the incident being significant in nature.
05:16 So I was expecting something that was going to require a lot of work, probably not what I saw.
05:22 Everywhere that you moved on the bridge, fog just obscured more and more of the scene.
05:27 So it was really hard to get an exact picture as to what had gone on and the shape of the problem.
05:32 Luckily for us, no one was killed.
05:36 Luckily for us, there was no hazardous substances, no major HGV vehicles involved.
05:43 There was a number of entrapments, obviously.
05:46 No one was really seriously injured.
05:49 It was just a case of starting at one end and slowly making our way through.
05:53 Some of the vehicles are unrecognisable, what they are.
05:57 As the incident unfolded, I was given the task that there was two people within a vehicle
06:05 that was trapped in by other vehicles and they couldn't get out.
06:10 I was able to help assist one of the patients out of the vehicle.
06:15 And then I sat in a vehicle with a patient until other crews on the fire brigade come to assist.
06:23 They had a dog that they were travelling with in the car, but the dog was nowhere to be seen.
06:30 Because the vehicle had been crashed on the rear, the dog had escaped.
06:37 But at that point, the cage was so unrecognisable that you couldn't tell if the dog was inside or had managed to get out.
06:45 But yeah, later on that day, we'd found the dog as well.
06:49 Time has gone quickly, hasn't it? Ten years it's flown by.
06:54 But I'd just like to, again, I'd just like to hope that people that look back on this incident,
07:03 particularly the local community, hope and trust they've recovered well.
07:09 And I wish them all very well for the future.