Lockerbie Response

Residents thought a military plane may have crashed when it happened. Or that there had been a meltdown at the nearby nuclear plant.
An elderly resident near Rosebank Crescent escaped her house unharmed after it was completely destroyed by falling fuselage. She and her dog hid in a doorframe when they heard rumbles approaching. 44 bodies were found in her garden.
Several houses on Sherwood Crescent were destroyed and a 50 m long crater left after the wing section of the plane landed there. The fuel contained in the wings ignited and a huge fireball resulted, further damaging other houses in the neighbourhood. 11 residents died.
Only the house of the Catholic priest in the Sherwood Crescent neighbourhood escaped damage.
The nose section of the plane landed in a field outside of town across the road from Tundergarth Church. The pilots, navigator, a flight attendant, and several 1st class passengers were still strapped in their seats.
At the local golf course, 60 bodies were found, falling on fairways and bunkers. Other bodies fell in gardens, into trees, and into the attics and roofspaces of houses. In the tiny village of Balstack nearby, more bodies, luggage, and fuselage were found.
In Rosebank Crescent, 60 more bodies are found from the economy class section of the plane, along with massive amounts of luggage, the galley, and wheels.
The engines fell in various locations around town, one of them creating a 6 foot hole in the ground.
Lockerbie residents sprang into action, immediately putting out fires (which seemed to be everywhere) and transporting the dead to a makeshift mortuary in the town hall. The town hall was soon deemed too small to handle the number of casualties, and too hard to get in and out of, and so the bodies were transferred to the town ice rink.
The task of identifying the dead and assembling their remains became the task of the local police force, firefighting force, and forensic specialists. It was a grisly task that haunts the residents of the town to this day. Most will not talk about it.
Hundreds of volunteers from the town provided hospitality in the form of food, shelter, and laundry services to the soldiers, police officers, public officials, and family members of victims who soon descended on their town. It is said they provided unprecedented kindness and love in the midst of their own grief.
Lockerbie residents painstakingly sought to identify which clothing items belonged to which victim before washing and returning them to family members. Many items of clothing were identified by the development of film found in the luggage of the travel abroad students.
The memorials around Lockerbie are peaceful, quiet, carefully planned, beautiful, and extremely honoring to the victims of the disaster. There is a memorial garden in Sherwood Crescent where the wings fell, a memorial in Rosebank Crescent, a Garden of Remembrance in Dryfesdale Cemetery honoring all 270 victims with a special section set aside for those bodies never found, and a Memorial Room at Tundergarth Church which contains a Book of Remembrance dedicated to the victims. All are lovingly kept and cared for by residents of Lockerbie to this day.
Lockerbie’s town hall contains a stained glass window commemorating all the nationalities of the victims.
In the US, Lockerbie sent a memorial cairn to be erected in Arlington National Cemetery with 270 stones quarried near Lockerbie. The cairn was sent to give those who couldn’t make it to Lockerbie a place to memorialize their loved ones.