BRAVE.. Sacha White who was staying in the Everglades Hotel when it was firebombed recently
AN EDERNEY A level student and her brother were among those caught up in last week’s incendiary attack on the Everglades Hotel.
Sacha and Bruce White, Drumskinney, Ederney had returned to the hotel from visiting their father, William who is in the Intensive Care unit at Altnagelvin Hospital.
“We had got back to the hotel from the hospital around 10.30, and we were wrecked. We went straight to bed.”
At first, Sacha and her brother thought little of the initial alarm sounding.
“We assumed it was a fire alarm or a fire drill and we rolled over to go back to sleep.
“The alarm went off for a minute and came back on again and, at that point, there were knocks on doors down the corridor. My brother opened the door and the guy said, ‘you have to evacuate, you have to leave as quickly as you can’.”
Sacha told how, when staff and hotel guests were evacuated, she ended up right beside the hotel receptionist.
“She looked shaken up. She was shaking. Bruce asked her, ‘what’s happening?’, and she told us a masked man had entered the reception, threw a bag on the counter and said to her, ‘you have 30-40 minutes to get everybody out. This is a bomb, it’s going to go off’. She then raised the alarm and tried to get everybody out.”
Once outside, Sacha and Bruce put on blankets that were given out.
When it came to the 30-minute mark, the time given for the bmb to go off, police moved hotel staff and residents behind outbuildings for their own safety.
“It was then that the taxis started arriving from the City Hotel and picked up the guests in groups of four. It was when he came back to the hotel the next morning that we heard the bomb had gone off.”
The returning guests were escorted to their rooms to collect their belongings and, for Sacha, an eventual return home to swot for her A Levels this week, despite the trauma of her father’s illness and the bomb at the hotel.
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