Jim Roberts on Saving Lives at Sea

Possibly in the early years the ones that come to mind are the night that the … this is about 1976, when two oil tankers collided off of St Catherine’s. They were called the ‘Pacific Glory’ and the ‘Allegro’.

They collided and when they parted, unfortunately there was a lot of oil spilt and the ‘Pacific Glory’ actually caught fire. At the end there was some 40 or so people lost their lives.

The ‘Pacific Glory’ actually floated on the tide and came up from St Catherine’s. The ‘Allegro’ wasn’t too bad, she managed to sort herself out. But the ‘Pacific Glory’, she was disabled.

She actually came up on the tide and ended up right off of Forelands and she was probably a couple of miles off and I always remember the next morning, seeing her and the oil was all over the stern and the sea, the oil which was on the sea was actually on fire and it was actually on fire for about half a mile behind the boat.

I think the Southern Television, as it was at that time, actually said, their headline was ‘The day the sea caught fire’ and they sent their camera crew down to see it. But it was a horrible incident because there was an awful lot of people that were killed on it, a lot of Chinese seamen and the Bembridge Lifeboat went out to assist and they took their local Doctor, local Bembridge Doctor at the time, Dr John Arthur and he basically coordinated the medical side of it and he commandeered a vessel, a CAT volunteered its services called the ‘Norweiller’, in setting up a ‘field hospital’ on board and the injured crew members were brought on board there.

At the same time we had the Inter-Services Hovercraft unit at Lee-on-Solent and they sent some of their hovercraft down to the Norweiller and actually took the injured people off and took them into the hospitals in the Portsmouth area.

So, yeah, that was probably the first big incident that I was involved with and saw.