Man helps rescue drivers

Dec 16 2010 by Marjorie Kerr, West Lothian Courier

rescue

A BUSINESSMAN turned local hero when he answered mercy calls for help during last week’s Arctic weather conditions.

Wayne Gardner-Young, who owns the Kaim Park Hotel in Bathgate, spent 17 hours last Monday helping people stranded in the snow.

After taking his children to school in the morning, the businessman realised that the continuing heavy snowfall would cause serious problems, so he went home and collected his tractor.

When he got back to the hotel, he paid his staff to help him out on the roads and seven male employees manned a Land Rover and two tractors, one with a snow plough attached to the front.

They worked for most of the day clearing roads and freeing vehicles from the snow.

After helping some of his staff home, Wayne realised a lorry had become stuck and was causing a traffic jam through Bathgate.

He said: “I saw that there was a lorry blocking one of the roads so I decided to free it.

“The police came up to me and asked me what I was doing and I said that I was going to drag the lorry out of the way so that traffic could start moving again.

“So we dragged this artic lorry out through the centre of Bathgate.

“When people saw what we were doing we were called on to help others. We spent the day dragging vehicles out and clearing snow.”

Wayne and his team took a break between four and five before heading out again and working until 10pm.

But the Good Samaritan’s work wasn’t finished yet.

He said: “When I got home my wife said that she’d been on Facebook and discovered there were hundreds of people stranded on the M8.

“So I collected all the blankets we had in the house and headed back out.

“I told the hotel staff to prepare for more people arriving. We were offering anybody who needed it a free place to stay and laid on teas, coffees and soup.

“As it happened, not that many people came because they couldn’t get off the M8.”

The businessman said he was disappointed by the lack of work done by the authorities to keep routes clear, describing the situation on the roads as “an absolute shambles”.

He said: “There were practically no gritters out on the roads. The Kaim Park Hotel is next to the salt store for West Lothian and throughout the whole day I saw two or three gritters which I find quite shocking.”