‘I DID NOT WANT TO SEE THE BODIES’
Gold Coast family 100 metres from Lockerbie crash scene where passenger plane brought down
A GOLD Coast family was settling into their new home when their house shook as a massive explosion went off just 100 metres away.
The Williamson family, from Tallebudgera, had just moved to the Scottish town of Lockerbie in December 1988 when they were first-hand witnesses to the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103.
Next week marks 30 years since the disaster, which occurred in the sky above the town on December 21, 1988.
A bomb exploded aboard the jet as it was flying from the UK to New York, crippling the plane and causing it to disintegrate in a fireball above the town.
The burning remains of the fuselage fell, mostly landing on Sherwood Cres, destroying three houses and causing a giant crater.
It claimed the lives of 270 people, including 11 people who were on the ground where the wreckage struck, and left the area devastated.
Peter and Loris Williamson and their three daughters were new to Lockerbie, having relocated just a week before the disaster.
Mr Williamson, who celebrated his 39th birthday on the day of the disaster, was wellknown on the Gold Coast in the 1980s.
From 1981 to 1985 he was the president of the Gold Coast Soccer Federation before moving to Scotland in 1986 to work in his family’s furniture business.
The Lockerbie bombing was the second tragedy to hit the family in December 1988.
Their small home in the neighbouring village of High Tae had been destroyed by fire just after they moved in after an oil heater malfunctioned.
The family moved to Lockerbie and into a house on Carlisle Rd, around 100m from where the plane’s wreckage landed.
Loris Williamson’s parents spoke to the Gold Coast Bulletin in the hours after the explosion.
Palm Beach residents Maurie and Adrienne Bottcher said waiting hours to hear if their relatives were safe were the worst of their lives.
They were forced to wait for a call from Mr Williamson’s mother Alice from Lancashire in northern England who passed on the good news.
“My husband Maurie and I were sick in the stomach with worry as we feared for our family’s lives,” she said.
“Peter’s mother Alice phoned us at about 8.30am to say that our daughter had called to say the family was all right.
“Until then we were sick with concern – we tried to phone Scotland but could not get through.”
Mr Williamson was away in Leeds on a business trip at the time of the attack.
Mrs Williamson told the Bulletin after the accident she would always remember December 21, 1988 as “The day the sky turned bright orange and an incredible heat seeped into the house.”
She had been bathing his daughter Carrie, then aged three years, when the explosion occurred.
“I heard what I thought was a tremendous sustained clap of thunder and then the sky turned bright orange – then I felt an incredible wave of heat seep through the bathroom window,” she said.
Immediately after the explosion she rushed to check on her other children – Hayley, then aged five, and Keltie, then 11 years and then ran for the town’s heart to try to contact her family.
“Cars were being turned away from the town but I managed to run past the crash site in a bid to find a working phone,” she said.
“I just put my head down and ran – I did not want to see dead bodies.
‘The place was like a war zone, it was sickening.”