GARY James Case, taxi driver, is looking out the window of his flat in Bridge Street, Granville, when he sees the Blue Mountains express on the railway line below. He hears what he describes later as ‘two metallic noises’ as it approaches the overhead bridge spanning the line. The big locomotive spears off the rails, veers, then tips and skids, dragging the first carriage with it. It has hit the iron stanchion supporting the bridge. Ten seconds later there is a massive ‘whoomph’ The bridge has fallen on two carriages. It sounds like a bomb, and is just as deadly. A man calls out ‘Trust in God, Christ will save you.’ Another is heard giving himself the last rites. It is 8.12am, 18 January 1977.
SHE was nineteen, crushed beneath steel girders and three hundred tonnes of concrete and surrounded by the dead and the dying. Yet she found strength to ask questions that made the policeman want to cry.
Instead, he lied. Fiercely – as if someone’s life depended on it. Which, in a way, the girl’s did. He had already saved her once, after crawling through the tiny, suffocating space in the rubble between the bodies, fearing that the concrete slab a few centimetres above his skull could drop at any moment, killing him and anyone else still alive. When he’d found her, seen that her face was turning blue, he risked moving her injured head to let her breathe, and prayed it wouldn’t harm her spine. She started breathing, but her legs were pulped, her pelvis smashed and she was bleeding so much it seemed she would soon be just another body among many.
But she wouldn’t give in. First she asked him if she would live. Yes, he said. Then she asked if she’d be able to walk again. Again, the rescue policeman didn’t hesitate. Then she asked him a question that still touches him more than all the awful things he’s seen. ‘Will I ever be able to have a baby?’ she whispered.
There was a pause, broken by the moans of the injured and the dying entombed in the crushed railway carriage. ‘Yeah,’ he said gently. ‘God can do miracles.’
He said it but he didn’t believe it, then. Even when, hours later, they finally inched Debbie Skow’s broken body on to a stretcher and out of the horror and into hospital, Constable Gary Raymond thought the brave girl would die.
But he was wrong. Debbie Skow was in a coma for sixty-five days, and endured dozens of operations, but she lived. She eventually walked a little, despite losing a leg. She married. And, many years later, after adopting a daughter because she thought she would never conceive, Debbie had a baby. A miracle, just as he’d said.
There were other miracles at Granville on that summer morning more than twenty years ago, the day Australia’s worst train disaster killed eighty-three people on their way to work in Sydney.
Debbie Skow was one of 213 injured, and Gary Raymond just one of many rescuers. Each has a story, though not all can be told.
IT was a Tuesday, a hot morning guaranteeing a scorching afternoon, and Dick Lamb’s day off from the police search and rescue squad. He was taking his family to his father’s place on the northern beaches. They left home at Milperra in Sydney’s western suburbs about 8am, already in shorts and thongs.
Minutes later Lamb pulled the family Falcon into Woodville Road to head through Granville. The radio was tuned to the 2UE breakfast show. Suddenly, the flip chat was shattered by a news flash. A bridge had fallen on a train at Granville; people were trapped. Lamb turned left into Bold Street and gunned the V-8 motor — but not for long. As he approached the railway cutting he saw the void where the Bold Street bridge had been. He jumped out, ran to the edge of the bridge and looked over.
An entire span of concrete and steel had fallen. Beneath it were two passenger carriages, their roofs squashed below the level of the seats.
An overturned locomotive, a wrecked carriage and one eerily unscathed carriage were scattered on the city side of the broken bridge. Other carriages were strung crookedly on the opposite side.
Lamb yelled to his wife to go home for his overalls, cap and heavy boots. He climbed down the broken bridge, dodging three Holdens and a motorbike stranded on it. He was one of the first police at the scene, but not the first helper.
‘The first thing I saw,’ he was to recall, ‘were the local butchers, the Dawson brothers, helping people out of the wreck. They were great blokes. There were people everywhere. Some were lying down. Some trying to get up. Some walking around, dazed, suffering all sorts of injuries.
‘There were some ambulance officers already there. I ran under the bridge and looked up at the carriages. I could hear the screaming. People were hanging out of the carriages.’
He scrambled back up the bridge to the road. Car 3410 from Fairfield police station had just arrived. He raced over, pulling his identity badge from his shorts and flashing it at the stunned uniformed police before grabbing the radio to tell headquarters how serious it was, and demanding all available equipment.
Then he ran down to start sorting the living from the dead and dying. A few minutes later he looked up and saw his longtime crewmate arrive in a rescue truck. ‘Bruce!’ he yelled, waving frantically. At least now they had some proper equipment. And another level head to help bring order to the sickening chaos.
BRUCE Gane usually took the truck home to Moorebank on nights he was on call. If there was an emergency he’d pick up Lamb, who lived nearby, and off they’d go, lights flashing, siren wailing.
That morning Gane got into the truck, as usual, just after 8am, routinely flicked on the police radio and called in. A couple of minutes later he was told to switch to channel four, the working channel for that area. Something was on.
The first messages about Granville were vague. ‘They said it was just a footbridge that had collapsed on a train and that there was two or three people trapped. I tried to think where there was a footbridge. They said to go to Bold Street.’
He pushed the big eight-tonner hard. It took ten minutes, and the radio crackled bad news with mounting urgency. When he got there, he was to recall, he saw his mate Dick Lamb in the middle of ‘a hell of a mess’.
Lamb ran up a fireman’s ladder propped against the cutting and snatched spare overalls, boots and as much equipment as he could carry. He ordered uniformed police to carry more gear down to the crash.
Rescue trucks were starting to arrive from all over Sydney. One, from police search-and-rescue headquarters in Redfern, was driven by Gary Raymond. When he’d first got the call he imagined a goods train with an oversize load stuck under a bridge. Each call painted a grimmer picture.
A policeman who’d seen only the first carriage reported ‘a small number injured’. The next report said people were trapped under the bridge. The next demanded the rescue squad urgently. But it wasn’t until he saw it himself that Raymond realised how bad it was.
The bridge had fallen on the third and fourth carriages. Bruce Gane went to carriage four, and Lamb to carriage three, where he cut a hole in the roof with a chainsaw and let himself into the charnel house inside.
Logic told him how many passengers must be trapped, but he was still shocked by the number of dead and injured in the seats. He cleared debris, made an opening at floor level and started passing out the living, assisted by a fireman, ambulance officers and other police. The dead, unless they were in the way, could wait.
He was to put it later: ‘We had to do the most good for the most number. We were taking out the least hurt first. We had to get them out of danger.’
At one end of the carriage the concrete slab threatened to slump lower at any moment. At the other, tonnes of loose bricks teetered on the flimsy roof. The rescuers worked with frantic care. Any slip could mean death.
LAMB heard the woman’s voice through the debris. ‘Help me. Please help me.’ He crawled along the floor of the carriage. He recalls vividly how the tacks in the railway carpet had sprung and snagged his overalls.
There were bodies everywhere, some with awful injuries, others with barely a mark. Many had been asphyxiated in the crush. He had to crawl over a dead woman to get to the live one. She was bleeding from the nose and had a broken collar bone but, astonishingly, otherwise seemed all right. That was a miracle in itself; it would need another one to get her along the tiny space he’d cleared under the concrete. She was lying face down on the floor, pinned by the caved-in roof. There was no room to move.
Lamb told the terrified woman he had to fetch equipment, and promised her they’d get her out soon. He tried to crawl out backwards on his stomach, but other rescuers had to drag him by the ankles. He was sent into another part of the carriage to help someone else.
Gerry Buchtmann, firefighter by profession, captain of the Nepean volunteer rescue brigade by choice, made good Lamb’s promise. He wriggled into the hole under the slab, which had settled to about thirty centimetres above the carriage floor.
The stench of death filled his lungs. A mixture of vomit, blood and excreta that filled that claustrophobic space like an inert gas.
He had to move bodies and debris to clear around the woman, who had the carriage roof bearing down on her. He used a pruning saw, a fireman’s axe and pliers to hack away the roof’s laminate lining, piece by piece. ‘It was terrible stuff to cut.’
She wanted water but he couldn’t give it to her in case she would have to be operated on later, in hospital. He wet her lips with ice and a damp handkerchief. Then came the hard part. There was only one way to get her out. He forced his hands under her chest and, gripping behind her breasts, slowly tugged her longways on the floor. It took until after 3pm to get her out.
She vanished into an ambulance, and was taken to a different hospital from other victims. None of the rescuers saw her again for years, but they heard of her.
Weeks later, she walked into Parramatta police station and told a detective she was a Granville survivor. Hundreds of people were claiming the same thing, so the detective put some questions. Asked how she’d been rescued, she said a young man had pulled her out by the breasts. The detective shook his head and showed her the door. Later, he happened to tell a senior officer about the ‘crackpot’ woman with the crazy story. But the officer remembered hearing how Buchtmann had dragged out a woman who’d since been lost in the system. He ordered the surprised detective to find her.
Distress does strange things. Dick Lamb had described the woman he’d found as ‘about eighteen’, and Buchtmann guessed she was in her twenties. It turned out she was a mother of five, almost forty. Her name was Margaret Shuttler.
GLEN Summerhayes was driving to work when he heard the first radio reports. As a State Emergency Service officer, and a trainee with the Nepean volunteers, he thought he could help.
At Granville, the police commander took one look at his small frame and sent him into a tiny hole cut into a crushed carriage. A doctor asked him if he could inject morphia, handed him ampoules of the pain killer and a syringe. He crawled along, feeling the still-warm bodies, injecting the living.
One survivor was so caged in that he couldn’t touch him, but he managed to thread an oxygen hose to him through the maze of debris.
Rescuers could smell gas. It came from ruptured bottles of LPG used to run the carriage heaters. Summerhayes saw a tradesman crouched inside a carriage trying to start a small chainsaw. He yelled at the man to stop, grabbed the machine and handed it outside to a policeman – who started it, first pull.
‘That was one of the miracles of Granville,’ he was to say later. ‘If it had started underneath it could have ignited the gas and we might all have gone up.’
He found each leaking gas bottle and painstakingly cut it out of the wreckage. On the roadway above, police warned onlookers not to smoke because of the danger of an explosion. Unbelievably, some tossed butts down into the twisted metal below. It didn’t ignite. Another miracle.
After lugging the last gas bottles out, Summerhayes collapsed from lack of oxygen. He was taken by ambulance to Parramatta Hospital. Two hours later he discharged himself and hitched a ride back to Granville in a police car. He went back to work under the slab. His memories of what happened after that are hazy, but some things were to stick in his mind.
In carriage three he saw a couple cuddling each other, as if they were asleep. They were dead.
A man in his 70s dressed in khaki shorts and shirt was pinned down by a steel stanchion across his lap. He said, ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m old. Go and get the young ones first.’ Later they slid him onto a spinal board and into an ambulance. No-one there knew that old man’s name, or if he lived or died, but they never forget his offhand bravery.
THERE were other brave people. Michael ‘Scotty’ McInally was one of them. The Blacktown ambulance officer, originally from Dundee, Scotland, was to emerge from the wreckage more affected by the experience than many passengers.
After driving one of the first ambulances to reach the scene, McInally crawled into the fourth carriage. He found a man trapped from the waist down in the mangled metal. He wormed his way next to the injured man – and stayed there for the next ten hours, despite the painful position and the danger.
McInally took off his own safety hat and put it on the injured man’s head. He poured orange juice onto a wad of cotton wool and gently swabbed the other’s mouth. And he talked to him through the entire ordeal.
The hurt man was Bryan Gordon. He was in his early thirties, and talked about his wife and daughter at home in the Blue Mountains. McInally, ten years older, told him about his own two boys. As the minutes crept into hours they forged a friendship so strong that when the rescuers were ordered to leave because it was considered too dangerous, the obstinate Scotsman abused his superiors and refused to budge.
McInally wasn’t the only one to stay. Dick Lamb, Gary Raymond, Gerry Buchtmann, Bruce Gane and others promised the injured they wouldn’t leave them. If the slab fell, they were prepared to die, too.
McInally promised Gordon they’d get him out. But they both knew it wouldn’t be until everyone else had been removed, so that jacks could be used to lift one end of the slab a fraction to free his pulped abdomen and legs. He told rescuers they should concentrate on other people because he was so badly hurt.
Gordon was the last to be rescued, around 6pm. Afterwards, McInally staggered out and sat on the railway line, shaky, weak and aching. There was no one to talk to. He drove himself back to Blacktown ambulance station, signed off and went home.
‘And that’s when the trouble started,’ he was to muse, years later. ‘That’s when I started to remember things I’d seen down that hole.’
It got worse. Three days later Bryan Gordon died, and part of ‘Scotty’ McInally died with him. He’d risked his life for a stranger, become his friend, then lost him anyway. McInally was to work for another twelve years as an ambulance officer, but never really got over Gordon’s death.
Every year, on 21 January, he goes to Gordon’s grave.
SISTER Margaret Warby was scrubbed and ready for theatre at 8.30am when word of the disaster reached Parramatta Hospital. She grabbed overalls, hard hat, syringes, morphia and the emergency medical kit, then jumped into a police car.
In a diary she wrote later, she painted a stark picture. ‘People are trapped in the third carriage, some crushed and others pinned beneath concrete and giant steel girders … This is switch-off time. No room for emotions here. I look for survivors and ignore the dead.
‘A woman is very severely crushed and only barely conscious. A young man is pinned by his legs. Another man has one of his ears ripped off. I give them pain killers, wrap them up, joke with them. Swear, too, occasionally. The police rescue squad are marvellous. They swear too, heaving and tugging, cutting and burrowing with their bare hands. It’s hot and filthy. Oxygen offers some relief for the trapped but they are getting weak.
‘I come out with the crushed woman, manning the resuscitator over the wreckage, up the embankment and on to the hospital. Once she is there … I turn around and go back. No point in sending a young nurse into a thing like this where she’ll carry the memory of it for the rest of her life. I’ve seen it before … I know how to cope.’
Sister Warby was credited with saving seven lives.
BY nightfall all survivors had been rescued, but for police the job wasn’t finished. Not by a long shot. They had to remove the slab to retrieve the dead strewn beneath.
They worked all night and next day. Workmen broke the bridge with jackhammers, cut steel beams with blowtorches, and lifted sections of concrete off by crane. As each piece was winched upwards more bodies were exposed. Each had to be tagged, photographed and carried to the temporary morgue set up in an army tent in the railway yards.
‘The worst thing,’ Dick Lamb was to recall, ‘was facing more bodies each time a slab section came off. It seemed as if it would never end. It played on my mind. The body of a little girl affected us all. Her mother was across the top of her, trying to protect her. A mother’s instinct…’
His voice trails off as he wakens old feelings. His friend Bruce Gane twists a paper cup in his hand, lights another in an endless chain of cigarettes, and stares into the distance.
The last bodies were recovered late on the second day. The exhausted rescuers threw their gear into heaps and started sorting it. It was then they found that onlookers had stolen tools from some of the rescue trucks. Gary Raymond went home drunk. His wife put him in the bath, put him to bed and burned his bloodstained overalls. A year later he was divorced. Not all scars from Granville are physical.
GARY Raymond is now a NSW police inspector and Salvation Army officer. Margaret Warby and Gerard Buchtmann were among five people awarded the Queen’s Gallantry Medal for their efforts at Granville. Glen Summerhayes was one of five awarded the Queen’s Commendation for Bravery. Other rescuers were later awarded a Granville medal struck to mark their selfless conduct.