Ten years ago, five members of one family were killed fleeing a storm in the Outer Hebrides. Who was to blame? And how has life on the islands changed since?

At 7am on 12 January 2005, Neil Campbell woke in a spare room of his father’s croft house on Benbecula, one of a chain of Hebridean islands known as the Uists. A BBC television director, he had agreed to deliver a live report for Radio nan Gàidheal, the Gaelic station, on how the community had been affected by the storm of the night before.

It had been the worst in living memory, and by first light it was clear a great deal of damage had been done to roads and buildings. What Campbell did not yet know – and was about three hours away from knowing – was that the words with which he concluded his broadcast had a dreadful personal resonance. “I think,” he said, “there will be a lot of people waking up to a day they’ll never forget.”

As soon as Campbell finished the report, he went out to look for his father, Calum, who hadn’t come home the night before. He might have stayed with his daughter, Murdina, but Campbell couldn’t reach her either. With a growing sense of foreboding, he called the police to report his father, sister and her family missing. The phone operator said, “Oh, my God” and hung up. Every passing minute felt like an eternity. Then a relative, calling round, told him, “They have found a body at Creagorry and they think it is Archie.”

Archie MacPherson was 36. He had grown up on South Uist but left for Glasgow, where he worked as a joiner and married Murdina Campbell, and where their children, Andrew and Hannah, were born. In 2003, they moved back to the island, buying a croft in the coastal township of Iochdar, near Archie’s parents. Murdina found work as a secretary in the local primary school. This was the Hebridean dream: returning to the island of your birth, bringing the generations together, continuing the traditional way of life.

Storms claim at least five lives Read more

The killing storm of 11 January 2005 had begun two days earlier as a shallow depression off America’s eastern seaboard, developing rapidly in intensity as it moved north-east, zeroing in on Scotland, and South Uist; the Met Office chart that recorded its progress shows a writhing tangle of fanged spirals. All across the island that night, mobile phones were down, electricity out. A driver passing through Iochdar at around 6.30pm had seen Murdina and her family standing framed in the window of their home, holding candles.

At some point during the next half an hour, the family made a decision to flee. The combined power of wind, tide and low air pressure had driven the Atlantic up over the beach and machair (the strip of sandy grassland characteristic of the Hebrides) to the threshold of their house. Waves crashed against and around the building with such force that rocks were thrown into the front garden. They left for what seemed the greater safety of Archie’s parents’ home – David and Mary MacPherson lived just a mile and a half along the coastal road. Calum went in front, in his car. The others followed in their red Saab. On this narrow single-track, the two vehicles appear to have been swept off the road by the storm surge and swallowed by the flood. Photographs discovered in Murdina’s camera later showed the view west through their rain-smeared kitchen window, the coming tempest – a hungry sea under a darkening, angry sky.

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The Uists, as seen by God or Google Earth, look as if some great landmass has been dropped from heaven, shattering into shards. A five-hour ferry trip north-west from Oban on the mainland, the islands are connected by a series of causeways, large and small. Were Bonnie Prince Charlie to land today on tiny Eriskay, as he did in 1745, he could travel 60 miles, all the way north to the tip of Berneray, stopping only for sheep on the road.

Around 5,000 people live here, mostly on the west coast, facing the Atlantic. Gaelic is spoken widely. The three main islands are quite different in character. North Uist is Presbyterian, although the Sabbath is not observed as strictly as it once was. South Uist is largely Catholic: dotted all over the island are glass-fronted roadside shrines to Our Lady, some of them lit at night. You drive past, in the immense darkness, and glimpse a blurred blue dress, a swaddled child, hands raised in prayer. Benbecula feels quasi-military: it is home to a missile-testing range; the slopes of Rueval, its largest hill, are made strange by the juxtaposition of a radar tracking station’s white domes and a 25ft granite statue of the Virgin and Child.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Neil Campbell, who reported on the storm for the BBC, not knowing five members of his family had been lost. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian

The causeways have their genesis in the 1975 establishment of a single local authority with responsibility for the whole of the Western Isles. Depopulation had long been a problem, and it was felt that life on the islands would be made sustainable, economically and culturally, if transport between them could be improved.

The South Ford Causeway, from Benbecula to South Uist, was built in 1982. For the previous 40 years, a bridge had linked the islands; before that, you took your chances at low tide with a horse and cart. Not everyone made it. (One memoir of island life recalls, “The South Ford was a dangerous place. Ghosts of people who had been drowned made frequent appearances. They were to be recognised by traces of sand in their hair.”)

The Campbell and MacPherson families believe this causeway was a significant factor in the deaths of their loved ones: the wind-driven Atlantic, unable to pass through this blocked channel, became like water overflowing a basin, spilling out on to the surrounding land and submerging the coastal roads to a high watermark of almost two metres. Now, 10 years on, the families are calling for a fatal accident inquiry, the Scottish equivalent of a coroner’s inquest, into exactly what happened that night. They expect it would establish the culpability of the causeway as a legal fact, putting pressure on the council to remodel it. Flooding will end more lives on Uist, they fear, if lessons are not learned. This is why they have decided to speak for the first time about the storm that blew into their lives a decade ago: “We want that causeway opened up,” says David MacPherson, Archie’s father, “so no family will suffer what ours has.”

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There were eight Campbell children, four girls and four boys, growing up in a three-room thatched cottage in Benbecula. Marybell, the eldest, was born in 1962. Murdina came along five years later.

It was to allow their own children to experience the island life they had known that Murdina and Archie chose to return home, swapping the big city for the big sky. “They moved back only two years before the accident,” says Marion Campbell, who was three years older than her sister Murdina. “They wanted to give their kids a safer, happier way of life.” She smiles grimly at the irony.

We are talking in Marion’s flat in Glasgow three days after what would have been Murdina’s 47th birthday. For someone who lost her father, sister, brother-in-law, niece and nephew all at once, these anniversaries – the would-have-beens, the should-have-beens – are especially painful.

Marion was at work when she got a phone call about the accident. She remembers screaming. At that point, only Archie’s body had been found, washed up by the side of the road. Marion and others in the family who lived on the mainland made the long journey north in several cars. “My first thought when I got to Uist, because I was in shock, was, I’m going to wade into the sea and swim out and find Murdina,” she recalls. “My husband was physically holding me back. I just so wanted to go into the sea. It was drawing me to it.”

Murdina MacPherson with her children by the car in which they died. Photograph © Neil Campbell

It is strange to talk about this in a city flat, on a sunny day, with the sound of children at play rising from the street. It all seems so far away, yet Marion, as she talks, is right back there. She and the others were met by those siblings already on the island – Marybell and Neil. There followed a blur of days. “All I remember is a whirlwind of people in and out the door. Priests, ministers, the doctor. The seven of us that were left would sit in the sitting room and every now and then the police would come in and say, ‘We’ve found somebody else. We’ve found somebody else. We’ve found somebody else.’ And the last person was Andrew.”

Neil Campbell identified the bodies, all but one. “I saw it as a duty,” he says. “I didn’t want anybody else to do it, to see them like that. But I couldn’t do it with Murdina. Just too close to her.”

He had seen her on the day she died. Neil lived in Glasgow at the time, but had travelled to the island that morning for work. He popped over to visit. “I told her, ‘You look beautiful. You look radiant’ and gave her a big hug. I’d never said that to my sister before. These are the things you think about afterwards. I had a wee chat with her, played with the kids. I even took photos… I have these perfect final memories. It was like I got the perfect opportunity to say goodbye.”

I remember a whirlwind of people in and out the door. Priests, ministers, the doctor, the police

Neil almost lost his own life in the storm. Murdina had invited him to her house that evening, for a drink and some food. He set off from the village of Balivanich at about half-past six, but after three miles hit flooding and his car began to float away. A rock smashed the back window and the wind roared in. He couldn’t see anything for water. He panicked, shouting, “Help me, God! I’m dead!” over and over. Somehow, he managed to get the car under control and returned home.

He knows he was fortunate. What would have happened had he reached Murdina’s home as planned and left with them? “There would have been six members of the same family killed.”

There were a number of lucky escapes that night. In Benbecula, at around 7.30pm, a five-man fire crew were responding to a call-out when the engine became waterlogged. The men abandoned their vehicle and, in wind gusting at over 100mph, made for a house a short distance away on the brow of a hill. The Atlantic, on a normal day, is a few hundred metres to the west of the road at that point, but it had surged over the fields and was rising fast – from one to three feet in a few minutes and growing deeper all the time. A tidemark inside the 12-tonne fire engine, which was shifted by the water from one side of the road to the other, showed that it reached two metres.

“You’d think you were in the middle of a rapid river,” a firefighter told me. Debris was being swept past: planks of wood, beach rubbish, a dead seal. “We jumped out, linked arms. The tide was trying to take us away, but we inched our way up. When we got to the top of the hill, because of the wind, we couldn’t stand up, so we crawled on our hands and knees. Slates were coming off the house and slamming into the ground, four inches deep.”

The bill for repairing damage – to roads, causeways, a school – has been estimated at between £15m and £20m. That does not include the cost to individuals (few roofs were left intact that night) nor the losses suffered by farmers. One crofter alone gathered 72 dead sheep the next day. “If this had happened in the south of England, it would have been declared a national disaster,” says Uisdean Robertson, a local councillor.

The most destabilising effect of the storm, however, was invisible – the way it brought a sense of vulnerability to the island. Born into a culture where gales are common, Hebrideans can be blase about the weather. “We thought it would be just another storm,” says David Muir, recently retired from a senior flood risk-management role with the council. “Tie down the henhouse, that sort of thing. But it turned out to be vastly different.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Calum Campbell, who was swept away in the storm. Photograph © Neil Campbell

Now, there is a real fear of bad weather. “There is a loss of confidence in travelling in the evening, between islands especially, if there are storms forecast,” Muir says. “People are conscious of what happened in 2005, and what could happen to them. Community events, ceilidhs in village halls, are often poorly attended or cancelled because people are worried about going out. This was once considered a very safe place to live, but there’s this threat from the sea now.”

Marybell MacIntyre knows that when the wind blows hard on Uist now, people think of her, of what happened, and she is grateful for that association and the compassion that comes with it. “It’s like, ‘OK, so I’m not alone in this. That’s so good, that you feel the same horror.’ When a colleague puts their hand on my arm and says, ‘Marybell, I think about you on these bad days’, I feel like hugging them, because they’re acknowledging that it hasn’t just gone away.”

Marybell, a teacher of English and Gaelic, and her husband Angus still live on Uist. They feel that being on the island has helped them cope. “Facing up to it makes you stronger,” Marybell says. “I drive past the place where Murdina’s body was found on my way to school: if I wasn’t doing that every day, I couldn’t work. So I just end up doing it and not thinking about it. Whereas my sister who lives in Inverness, when she drives across that causeway, she’s a wreck.”

We thought it'd be just another storm. Tie down the henhouse, that sort of thing. It turned out to be vastly different

Their religious faith has helped, as it has many on the island. Father Roddy McAuley was the priest who tried to comfort them, and believes the islanders’ reaction was a manifestation of faith. “I would say God was in the countless people calling at the homes of the broken with baking and gifts of hospitality,” he says. “God was in the people searching for the bodies, in the solidarity of the community, in the people gathering to pray… In the midst of this tragedy, God was there.”

While faith is a comfort for some, for others action will be the only solace. “It would bring us peace if they sorted that causeway out,” David MacPherson says. Now in his 70s, he still lives close to the spot where his son’s family were swept off the road. The kitchen window looks out on the sites where his grandchildren’s bodies were found.

The causeway has a 15m opening at its northern end; according to a plan obtained by MacPherson, it was designed to have an identical opening at the southern end. A study of the 2005 storm, carried out for the council, suggested that this would not have made a significant difference to the flood levels, but he can’t help wondering. Would his son and the others have survived? He is angered, especially, that the decision not to have that second opening appears to have been made to save money: “It cost our family a hell of a lot more.”

The study proposed instead that a 250m bridge be built to replace part of the causeway. At a meeting in April, this proposal was rejected on the grounds of cost (an estimated £20m), opting instead for a £2m set of flood-risk measures. Amid local fury, that decision was overturned a week later; the flood-risk measures will go ahead, but the council now plans to seek additional funding from the Scottish government to enable the creation of the bridge.

Lawrence MacEachen, 69, owns the croft on which seven-year-old Andrew was found three days after the accident. “I saw a man carrying the body of a child out of that dirty, filthy water,” he says. “If people had seen that, maybe they wouldn’t be thinking of the money that causeway is going to cost.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marion Campbell at the house her sister left in the storm; her son Angus (centre) and grandson Ewen (left) now live there. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian

The house where Murdina and Archie and Andrew and Hannah lived, the house they left that night, is small and white, with a narrow road in front and the Atlantic at its back. This is South Uist’s exposed western flank. The water is perhaps 60ft away at high tide, an inviting shade of pale blue, separated from the house by the machair and a strip of white sand. “It’s so disconcerting,” says Angus MacKinnon, looking out at the waves, “to think that beautiful thing can turn into this absolute monster.”

Angus is Marion Campbell’s son. He is 29 and lives in his aunt and uncle’s former home with his partner Gemma and their five-year-old, Ewen. He was very close to his family, the loss “flattened” him, and it is upsetting for him to talk about. He was living in Glasgow at the time and felt he would never return to the island, but he and Gemma decided, like Archie and Murdina before them, that Uist would be a better place to raise a child. They moved back in September last year.

“I found it hard to be alone in the house at first, because I would remember everything,” Angus says. “There’s Andrew’s room, there’s Hannah’s room. But my auntie would have loved my son, she would have loved Gemma, she would do anything for me, so I feel a connection with them now. It is amazing that we are getting to experience this life that they experienced, because I know they were happy.”

In January, when winds were recorded at 90mph, Angus felt for the first time what it is like to live on the Uist coast in a storm. The whole house was shuddering. Windows bulged. The sea came within a few feet of the garden. And all the time there was this enormous growling, the wind a wild beast. He can well understand why they left the house that night, a decision of which some have been critical.

Lately, Angus has taken to working in the garden, as his aunt once did. A rockery, a vegetable patch and other features Murdina had created had been buried with sand and earth by the force of the storm and 10 years of coastal drift. Digging down, he has uncovered signs of work and life. Daffodils and tulips that hadn’t come up since the storm bloomed this spring. Beneath a foot of topsoil, he found a toy car, and remembered that he and Andrew had once played with it. In grass long uncut, he discovered a toy watering can that had belonged to Hannah. His son picked it up, delighted, and asked where it had come from.

“I didn’t know what to say,” Angus says. “I’m not going to hide anything from him. I’ll let him know what the dangers are. But it was such a strange experience, seeing him holding it. Ewen doesn’t look like Andrew, but I sometimes see Andrew in him.” He pauses, tearful, fearful. “I don’t want anything to happen to him.”

Whether the family will get the official inquiry they desire remains to be seen, as does the future of the South Ford Causeway. What is certain is that life on the island changed that night, and as winter arrives, so the season of anxiety and bad memory will return.

“Nobody here will ever think of a storm again in the same way,” Marybell says. “Every time there is a storm, people will always think of us.”