A particularly disturbing picture emerged at today’s hearing of the Fatal Accident Inquiry into the deaths, at night and in heavy fog, of four Glasgow fishermen on Loch Awe in March 2009.
The men were on the way back from the Tight Line pub in Lochawe village, to their campsite on the north-east shoreside of the loch.
Iain MacKinnon, a station officer based at Oban Coastguard and a man with 24 years of experience in the service, told the Inquiry that on the night and at the scene of the rescue, he was ignored by the senior Fire Officer there, from Oban Fire Station.
Mr MacKinnon said that when he tried to get some information form the Fire Officer he was told to go away and come back later becaue the man in question was busy. He said that he had not, in his professional experience, met such behaviour before at the scene of an incident.
At this point, Mr MacKinnon went away and and organised a team of people to help to try to locate the position of the drowning men whose cries coud be heard.
He spoke of the briefest of moments when the fog shifted, they saw a small light out on the water and got a single bearing on it. Sadly the fog closed in again before they could get the necessary second bearing.
His plan was to try to get a position fix which might be of use to a helicopter, if one managed to get down fairly close to the surface.
Mr MacKinnon also told the Inquiry that about 20 years ago, the coastguard boat which had served in several rescues in Loch Awe, had been replaced by a seaborne craft not open to being transported to inland locations.
This evidence underlines the presence of a systemic problem in the rescue services, confirmed by other and different evidence to the Inquiry, where information sharing and teamwork seems to be far from embedded.