Woman who watched Isle of Man's Summerland disaster unfold says she 'stood there in total disbelief'

Transcript

00:00On the evening, my husband and I were just about to settle down and watch Top of the Pops which

00:04was, people might remember, it was a Thursday evening at 7.30 and then we saw a plume of smoke

00:09going above the chimney tops because we lived just at the bottom of Royal Avenue behind Port Jack

00:14and we thought it was a chimney fire at first and then realised quite quickly that,

00:19after my husband went over to have a look, that someone was on fire. So then I went over to have

00:25a look at it and stood on the cliffs above, so I was on a level with the rooftop, looking down at

00:32the back of it in total disbelief that what I was seeing was actually happening because

00:39it's something you'd never even have imagined in your wildest horrible nightmares that something

00:44like that could happen right in front of your eyes. So yeah, I mean the speed of it was just

00:51absolutely crazy, it just, you could see it jumping from panel to panel across the roofs,

00:57up the sides and in basically the space of half an hour, you know, that building was,

01:04there was no saving it, even the fire department said afterwards we didn't save some land, we just

01:10had to let it burn, it was just too ferocious, it was like a tsunami of fire and fair play to

01:16a local fireman who actually went up on a ladder, I watched from going up the side and he stood in

01:22front of that wall of fire with a hose, it didn't even, it evaporated into steam before it even

01:28reached the side, it was so fierce and yeah, I thought that was so brave to do that. Yeah,

01:36so then eventually there was probably about a dozen people there stood with me in that little

01:41scrubby piece of land which is now dedicated to Steve Hislop and a nice statue to him,

01:48a fireman came up eventually and said you guys will have to move away because there's tanks at

01:53the back and if they go you're in direct line for actually, you know, for hitting the explosion, so

01:59we had to walk away but yeah, it just left you with a total, total shock, total disbelief, I mean

02:05this building was our summerland, it was something, we were proud of it, there was nothing like

02:10summerland in the whole of the UK or even Europe, it was the first of its kind

02:15and to see it going up and to know as I was standing there that in all likelihood there

02:21would be people who didn't make it out of that building, the speed of it would have taken so

02:27many by surprise and ultimately of course we knew it took 50 lives that night.