Teacher carried baby to safety

Cars are removed from the scene of the multiple vehicle crash on the M5 motorway close to Taunton in Somerset
12 April 2012

A teacher caught up in the fatal M5 crash has described how he carried a baby to safety amid the carnage of cars ploughing into wreckage at 70mph.

Thomas Hamell, 25, said he hit a "wall of fog like emulsion paint" and suddenly saw a jack-knifed lorry loom into view.

His girlfriend Katherine Lane, 24, and father George Hamell, 56, were in the Renault Megane with him. "We are all lucky to be alive. If we had been one metre to the right we would not be here to tell the tale," he said.

He praised paramedics and described their efforts as "superhuman" but also described the cries of trapped motorists, blocked in their cars as flames engulfed the scene.

"It was so foggy. Suddenly as we came through it there was like a wall of lorries. One jacknifed in front of us. We managed to stop because we had just joined the motorway and were not going too fast. But a car came by within seconds at about 70mph and went straight into the lorry.

"We sat there and heard the thud of cars, one after another, hitting each other and thought we would be next. We could hear people screaming in their cars. It was utter carnage."

In an incident which probably saved their lives two other lorries jacknifed behind them, creating what was effectively a safe area.

This enabled the three to leave the car and go to the aid of a shocked mother with a young baby.

As they left amid the chaos of cars on fire and still hitting each other a potentially lethal piece of debris shot over his head. "It went over my head as I was carrying the lady's baby. We just carried on to a safe distance about 20 metres away. We were incredibly lucky. The woman who gave her child, her car was wiped out. It was utter carnage."

Mr Hamell, who lives in Wells, Somerset, is a music and drama teacher at Merchants' Academy, a south Bristol secondary school.

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