A major disaster of battlefield proportions was how the surgeon who handled the immediate medical repercussions of the Omagh bombing atrocity described it yesterday. Mr Dominic Pinto, consultant surgeon at Tyrone County Hospital, Omagh, told the inquest: "The scale of the disaster was unprecedented in the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland."
Mr Pinto asked the coroner, Mr John Leckey, to permit him to make a statement, as he wished to emphasise what the medical and nursing staff had faced. He said he had heard the explosion and had contacted the hospital, which had a major-incident plan. He then set out for the hospital, but encountered great difficulty getting there.
"The roads to the hospital were chock-a-block, bumper to bumper," he said. "I had to drive on the wrong side of the road with my lights on to get there."
When he arrived at the front of the hospital all seemed calm and quiet, "but what greeted me when I got to the main corridor was sheer pandemonium".
This was not just a major incident, but a major disaster of battlefield proportions, he said. There were people lying in the corridor, on trolleys and on the floor of the accident and emergency department, and overflowing into the radiology department.
Some 240 injured people had arrived in the first 45 minutes after the bombing, he said, and the first casualties had got there within five minutes.
At the time the unit was staffed for a normal Saturday afternoon.
Mr Pinto said he took control of the situation and moved the walking wounded to the out-patients' department and assigned the medical and nursing staff to tasks.
He had those injured who were lying on trolleys and on the floor taken to four wards, and the most severely injured to the intensive care unit.
He informed specialist colleagues in other hospitals to expect casualties, and he quickly inspected the seriously injured and decided who was to remain for treatment and who was to be transferred to other medical centres.
"It was only then that I could attend to the most severely injured in ICU, as I was the only experienced surgeon on duty," he said. Later, a surgical colleague from South Tyrone Hospital assisted him. However he said that without the assistance of the nursing staff, GPs and junior doctors, he was sure the final outcome would have been worse.
Mr Pinto said the scale of the disaster was unique in a number of aspects - the high number of casualties, the high number of elderly and of women and children, and the close proximity of the explosion scene to the hospital, "which soon became the centre of the incident".
Also unique was the high number of shrapnel injuries combined with the relatively low number of head injuries; and the number of hospital staff who had relatives killed or injured or who knew some of the victims.