Great Storm 1987

"I was on duty and I was doing a night shift.

Getting windy

Basically we’d had a fairly quiet night, one or two little routine jobs and we were just sitting in the duty room and we could here the wind getting up. It was starting to become quite fierce and one of my colleagues at the time wasn’t very happy about it, they didn’t like the winds.

Disappearing caravan

We arrived down at Pegwell. It was all in darkness. We found the lady who was standing in the doorway of her caravan and she beckoned us over but there were bits of caravan, rubbish all over the place, strong winds and there were lots of trees as well and you could hear bits and pieces breaking in the distance. We got to the lady to find that she had an ankle injury and it was quite swollen. We managed to persuade her to leave and we just as we got her into the ambulance her caravan disappeared, it just rolled away! She was utterly shocked.

Whistling in the wind

We’d heard via the radio that the road to Canterbury was blocked which was the nearest Accident and Emergency unit at that time of the morning so we had to re-direct ourselves and go into Margate which was the local general hospital.

Every road we were coming to there were vehicles and there were trees and rubbish. We found a route that was clear and right bang in the middle was the milkman delivering the milk and he was whistling away.

Nice and toasty

We took the lady into Margate hospital and then got another call to a nursing home down in a village called Monkton where a window had blown in and residents had apparently been injured. So we made our way down to Monkton, found all the residents sitting there, all cosy, drinking tea and coffee and toast but nobody was injured.

Damage everywhere

We then returned back to station. By this time dawn had broken and we could actually see some of the damage and it was horrendous. It was like a bomb site, buildings with roofs missing, bits of wood and tarpaulin, plastic flying around all over the place.

The vehicle was hit many times on the way back with flying debris We parked at the petrol station and part of the sign had fallen up and had hit us on the side of the ambulance. As you can imagine we were getting a little bit frightened by this time.

Anyway, we got back to the station and parked up safely and that was the end of our shift thankfully."