‘It was horrific. There were people lying in pools of blood’
WEXFORD’S JOANNE ADMINISTERED CPR TO VICTIM AT SCENE OF WESTMINSTER BRIDGE ATTACK
A WEXFORD woman caught up in the Westminster Bridge terror attack in London said she felt like she was on the set of a horror movie as she administered CPR to a victim in the midst of the carnage.
Joanne Saunsbury (nee Crofton) was in her first week of training as a London tour guide and was on an open-top tourist bus which had just driven onto the bridge when terrorist Khalid Masood aka Adrian Elms struck last Wednesday afternoon.
Joanne (34) didn’t see what happened but heard the screams of her colleagues on the other side of the bus as Masood ploughed a Hyundai SUV into pedestrians and jumped out of the vehicle brandishing knives to stab and kill unarmed police officer Keith Palmer who was guarding the entrance to the Palace of Westminster.
The Wexford woman who moved to London following her wedding last autumn to Englishman Mark Saunsbury, trained in first aid with the Wexford Order of Malta and ran from the bus to help a badly injured man lying on the ground.
‘One person wasn’t moving. He was non-responsive and I was trying to get him to breathe and to get his heart beating so I was doing CPR,’ she said.
‘It was just horrific, there was blood and there were people lying in pools of blood,’ said Joanne who continued doing CPR until paramedics arrived to help the severely injured victim.
She doesn’t know what happened to the man. ‘I didn’t get his name or anything about him but he was so badly injured and I couldn’t find a pulse. I don’t know, but where there’s life there’s hope’.
Three pedestrians including two British nationals and an American man died following the attack while up to 50 more were injured, some of them critically. Visiting tourists of different nationalities were among the wounded including a group of French students from Brittany. Three police officers were also injured. The attacker was shot and killed at the scene by an armed policeman.
A shocked Joanne spoke of the nightmare scenario that unfolded on the crowded bridge. ‘It is only in the last few days that I can process the ordeal’, she said.
‘I was on a training day and I was looking at London Eye when I heard colleagues screaming. Our trainer ordered all first aiders off the bridge. I was helping a walking wounded when I heard a woman scream there was a man ‘dead’. I ran towards him and started CPR then paramedics arrived and took over. It happened so fast that there was no time to think it was instinctive’.
Joanne said the experience was like a nightmare. ‘There were aeroplanes, the armed response unit. It was just a nightmare. I was expecting someone to come out and shout ‘cut’ and everyone to get up, because it was like something out of an action film or a horror film’.
She didn’t think about her own safety at the time but insisted she is no hero. ‘There were people down and it was a cry of first-aiders, so I was down the stairs and off the bus so fast I actually didn’t think. I wasn’t thinking of my own safety. I wasn’t thinking of anything else.’
‘At the time the adrenaline takes over. The person I was helping was severely wounded. I was just doing what I could,’ said Joanne, adding that she didn’t feel like a hero. She was just trying to help.
‘I keep wondering did I do enough. Everyone keeps telling me I was brave but I don’t feel brave. I don’t feel like I was a hero. I just feel like I did something at the time because I had to.’
Joanne who lives with her husband in Clapham, said that when she went home that evening and watched television coverage of the tragedy, it still seemed surreal.
She was back on the tour guide course with her fellow trainees in the centre of London the following day. ‘We’’re just doing our best at getting on with it,’ she said.
The first person she telephoned following the attack was her husband and then she rang her father Vivian, an award-winning Wexford Festival Opera volunteer, to let her family in Wexford know she was safe and well.
Joanne’s mother Monica who runs Wexford Walking Tours and is involved in music and drama said it was typical of her daughter to want to rush in and help other people.
Monica said she knew Joanne was due to go on the bus that day which was only her third day of training. She was glad she hadn’t heard about the terrorist attack on Westminster Bridge before her daughter telephoned to say she was okay.
‘I didn’t know it had happened until she rang her father to say she was alright. We saw it on television after that and couldn’t believe what we were looking at’, said Monica.
Joanne was a guide with Wex- ford Walking Tours and actually met her husband who works with London-based company Travel for Arts while conducting a tour during Wexford Opera Festival. She jumped at the opportunity to become a bus tour guide in London. ‘She rang me earlier in the week to say how great it was,’ said Monica.
Joanne’s sister Sarah also lives in London and teaches English Literature at King’s College where she completed