Helicopter hero ‘Nam’ relives night of “horrific” Spanish rescue

​It was on this night that Nam saved the lives of two severely injured Spanish fishermen along with the rest of the crew of HM Coastguard Search and Rescue Crew, based at Stornoway Airport.

Eighteen months on, the awards for the rescue are continuing to roll in, the latest being Technical Rescue of The Year from the Global Search and Rescue Excellence Awards.

Nam, 55, spoke to the Gazette about the events of that night and it is a story of high drama from start to finish.

He was on shift but had returned home for a sleep as he lives on Baker’s Road – close enough to the base to be able to respond to an emergency call within the necessary timeframe.

Shifts are all 24 hours, from 1pm to 1pm, and while a crew has to be airborne to an incident within 15 minutes during the day, that changes to 45-minute readiness between 10pm and 8am.

He was fast asleep beside wife Alison when the phone went. It was 4.30am.

“I knew it was a job,” he said. “It was Chris, who was the captain on the night. He said, ‘we’ve got a really, really nasty one. This could be a biggie.’

“Of course Alison wakes up then, all ears. Then he starts talking about the job itself. We’ve got a fishing vessel, 150 miles north west of the base, with two Spanish fishermen who’ve been dragged into the winching mechanism.’ It was brutal, gruesome.

“His exact words were ‘we’ve got a confirmed amputation of a leg and there’s one person still wrapped in the machinery who’s trapped at the moment… no one knows what to do with him.’”

Driving into the base, the mood was sombre – “usually it’s quite jovial” – as the crew tried to work out a plan. With the two casualties, they decided to ask the Inverness helicopter to assist, to give them a second winchman paramedic on the scene.

It would take longer, though, as Inverness is an additional 40 minutes to Stornoway and would need to stop to refuel.

“Our thought process was, ‘I’ll go down, help the guy that’s freed and hopefully we can get something done with the other guy and Inverness could help out and treat him’.”

The Inverness helicopter came to Stornoway, refuelled and was moving out to the scene as well when the coastguards got in touch by satellite phone, all radio communications having gone down at around 60 miles out, to say the second casualty was now free from the winch. He was also a confirmed amputation. “But at least he’s on the deck.”

At that point, Nam was still wanting the Inverness helicopter to come. “We’ve got two seriously injured casualties so the more paramedics we have on scene the better.”

As the Stornoway crew came alongside, the vessel was “rolling and pitching” and there was “squally weather coming through”. Given the conditions, they decided to put Nam down “clean” – without any equipment – to be as light and nimble as possible, and then the medical bags, which weigh 20 kilos themselves, and the two stretchers.

“I get down onto the deck and there’s no English being spoken at all. It’s a Spanish boat with very schoolboy English. My Spanish is non-existent. We were basically having a game of charades, working out what’s happening and what to do. The guys then take me to the casualties on a lower deck and it’s just sheer pandemonium.

“They were lying side by side but they’d erected a sheet between them because they were feeding off each other’s emotions. They were getting really upset looking at each other.”

Retelling the story, the details are graphic.

The first casualty had lost his leg from the groin, posing a huge problem in terms of stemming blood loss.

“We have training scenarios that we do all the time. ‘Okay, this guy has just lost his leg. I’ll put a tourniquet on here.’ Where do I put the tourniquet? There’s nothing there to tourniquet.”

Nam’s course of action was to pack the wound with a haemostatic gauze, a special bandage impregnated with an agent that promotes clotting. “It actually worked really well,” he said.

“All our treatments, all our equipment, is actually designed from battlefield injuries, so things that have happened in the war kind of lead on and come into everyday life.”

The next casualty had also suffered extensive damage to both legs and was bleeding profusely. He had two tourniquets applied, with Nam deciding to site them below the knees initially in a bid to try to save the joints. This was successful – but scary.

“The poor guy was in agony as I was tightening them up. It gave me a fright actually, because I’d never used them before and didn’t know what to expect. They stopped the bleeding immediately.”

Nam said their effectiveness was “incredible” but he added: “The most incredible thing was how are they still alive at this point?”

The crew had arrived at 6.30am and deduced, from “broken English with the captain”, that the incident happened at 1am. “They hadn’t had radio signal so they had to steam to get radio signal. The signal itself had to go to Spain and get redirected to the UK coastguard and then onto us.”

That whole time, the casualties were stricken. “We talk about it to this day and we just do not know how they survived.” Despite their horrendous injuries – the second casualty would lose both lower legs – they survived.

“None of us could actually believe we got them back to Stornoway alive,” said Nam. “Even though we’re getting them off the vessel, we’ve still got an hour’s transit to get back and in that hour anything can happen. So it’s just constant treating, stripping bleeding, doing their observations.”

Nam and his crew mates were also in disbelief at their apparent lack of pain.

“None of them were in pain. I can’t get my head round that. The captain had given them an injection of something and none of us knew what it was. Hats off to him. They were in no pain whatsoever until I put the tourniquet on and the guy’s screaming. I thought, ‘oh, I’ve ruined it now’.”

They didn’t even need pain relief during transit to Stornoway. “They were chatting away amongst themselves, speaking in Spanish, just talking to each other, quite the thing. Myself and JC were just looking at each other: ‘Is this for real?’

“None of it makes sense. In reality the guys should have been dead long ago. Even us moving them from the vessel to the aircraft can cause so many problems. Moving them, we could knock a clot out, so it’s very risky.”

By the time Inverness were halfway out to the scene, Stornoway had both casualties on board – so the Inverness support was stood down.

“It was down to myself and John in the back to keep them alive till we got to Stornoway.”

Winch operator John is also trained to an ambulance technician grade, meaning he and Nam could have one casualty each and then swap over to reassess “in case we missed something”.

“It’s a good system” but by the time they approached Stornoway the adrenalin was wearing off.

“I started shaking. I can still remember thinking, ‘we might make this, we might actually make it to hospital with these guys alive’ but the last 10 minutes as we were coming in, both of them started going downhill. Their observations were changing, blood pressure lowering, level of consciousness was getting worse.”

Nam described how the body plateaus, in ‘keep itself alive’ mode, and then “drops off really quickly”. This was the stage they were at.

At the hospital, a major incident had been declared and high dependency cleared to create an additional resuscitation room. Off-duty staff had been brought in, a retrieval team were on their way from Glasgow bringing additional skills and “by pure fate” there happened to be a consultant vascular surgeon in Stornoway, doing a week’s locum, who “probably saved the guys’ lives”.

They were stabilised and taken to theatre, ahead of retrieval to Glasgow.

“We call it the holes in the cheese. The holes in the cheese aligned just enough for everything to work out just perfectly. It’s out of this world.”

Nam grew up in Fife and moved to Lewis, where his family were from, aged 17. He first entered the world of work as an apprentice plumber with AC Ferguson before retraining as an ambulance paramedic in his early 20s. He switched to Bristow’s after 17 years on the road, so all in all he’s been “30 years a paramedic now”.

“I do look back on it (the incident). Everyone in emergency services is very self-critical. They go over the job in their head. ‘Could I have done this any better? There’s certain aspects, ‘yeah, I could have done better’ and you learn from it, which is the best thing. But you also learn to think about it and when it starts getting a bit nasty, ‘okay, put that away again, think about something else’.

“At the time, you just fixate on the job to be done. It’s when you have your downtime afterwards that you have to try and decompress.

“It’s always fine at the time. Your training takes over, but see when you finish. I’ve only ever broke down twice and it’s always when I get home. That job was one.

“Alison, bless her, she’s heard horrible stories… so she’s got that same black box in her head. But that’s a last resort because at work we all banter with each other.

“Banter is a good decompression, it helps you get over stuff. You can always talk to someone at work.

“We have outside agencies but no one has ever used them. Just have a coffee, go for a pint and talk about it. Have a laugh about it. Every nasty, nasty job always has something funny you always fixate on after the event.”

There are also dog walks on the Braighe and mountain biking in the grounds for stress relief.

On the night of 29th November 2023, it all worked perfectly, from the actions of Nam and the crew through to the hospital staff and the rehabilitation services.

“My brother in law said, ‘that’s a career defining event’ and that’s exactly what it was. It defined the whole 30 years of paramedicine that I’ve been doing.

“This happened in November and I was told they were repatriated to Spain in time for Christmas with their family. Makes it all worthwhile, doesn’t it?”

But that is where the story ends. “This is another strange part. Other production companies have tried to find them to do a follow-up and the Spanish government says ‘these guys don’t exist’. So who they were, we just don’t know. They didn’t exist to begin with.

“The Spanish government just isn’t talking.”