Roy Barraclough was at Shoreham Airshow with thousands of others on Saturday. When he saw the Hawker Hunter go down, the fire station commander for Worthing and Lancing jumped in his car and drove to the crash scene. In his own words, the 54-year-old tells reporter Adrian Imms about what he described as the worst incident he has faced since The Grand hotel bombing.

I WENT down to the airshow party out of personal interest - but I was also on-call.

We had a crew from Worthing at the north end of the airfield, which is where the planes come in, just in case.

I was near the airfield fire station, chatting with some colleagues when I looked up and saw the smoke and the fireball.

I didn’t need to wait for my control room to tell me what was going on.

The other crew didn’t wait to be sent, either. We just responded because we needed to go.

I got in my car and drove around the airfield to get to the crash site.

Because we didn't get the call in the normal way, we didn't get all the usually details coming through.

We didn’t know exactly what to expect but it was immediately clear that it was going to be serious.

There was the Hurricane crash at Shoreham Airshow in 2007 so it was with that experience that I felt it was likely to be a similar event.

That first fire engine was there within a minute, which comes with its own challenges as you haven’t necessarily prepared yourself for what you will be confronted with, both in terms of knowledge but mentality as well.

I certainly wasn’t prepared mentally for what I saw.

The first actual image I saw I can’t let you put in the paper.

I can only say it was like a bomb scene, like a bomb had exploded.

Because that part of the road is normally busy, to see it very quiet and smoke-filled on a bright sunny day was strange.

The smell of aviation fuel was in the air and there were pockets of smoke and fire over a large area.

The last time I saw a scene of such devastation was the Grand hotel bombing. You could only deal with it in the way you saw it.

I was the boss so I had to direct crews to put out the first fires and get out protective sheeting to cover the dead.

There was a lot of ‘head and heart’ going on.

My heart said I had to get involved and start helping people but my head told me I couldn’t get involved because I needed to ensure the structure and tactics were right.

My main concern was declaring a major incident and getting information back to get other emergency services there.

When you turn up to an incident of this magnitude, you’re trying to make sense of it and normalise it.

I spent a lot of time on the phone to our control room to get the resources we needed.

I was also directing firefighters around to put out fires or check if we needed to cut people out of cars. I was standing there saying: 'You deal with this, you deal with that'.

Fire, ambulance and police staff see a lot of terrible stuff in the course of their work and we are all human beings as well.

I was absolutely disgusted that there were people on scene who had seen and heard things that human beings should never see but that, alongside this, there were other people standing and walking around filming and taking pictures with their camera phones. That is quite traumatic in itself.

It was tempered with the fact I saw some fantastic human kindness from people being very supportive to each other, comforting them.

There were lots of different emotions and feelings going on.

I felt angry towards some people and compassionate towards others. Some of these will be reflected in my colleagues’ feelings, I know.

I did hear some officers using very strong language to the public to stop them doing what they were doing but that’s a moment in time.

Social media is playing a bigger role with incidents like this. From an accident investigation point of view, never has so much material been available. But there have also been some amazing comments on social media, really sympathetic, positive and good.

It happened at 1.20pm and I was there until about 7pm.

Initially I was breaking down the bigger scene into sections so others could deal with things.

In among this was the pilot and the plane. I wasn't near the plane when they got him out but my understanding is that the way it had broken up he was half in, half out of the plane. The paramedics were able to move him away from the scene and work on him.

Within about an hour and a half, our role, after we had put out the fires, became a support role to the police.

The road was littered with all sorts of things, parts of plastic from cars and the aircraft, and there were still casualties.

I don’t want to be too graphic or specific about things because there are the relatives of those involved to consider.

There wasn’t as much physical hard work to do, such as dragging hoses or wearing breathing gear, but it was demanding in other ways.

A lot of my crews needed what we call a critical incident debriefing, which has been very useful for them so we don’t have people affected by it long-term.

Personally speaking, I didn’t realise how much I needed to go through that process. We are all humans – it was a particularly traumatic scene.

It can’t be bottled up – these things have to be talked about.

I think it’s important that the public are aware of the job the emergency services do.

Thank you to the public for their kind messages of support but, above all, we are feeling for the relatives and friends of those affected by it.

We need to continue at the pace we are going here so we can hand the road over to the Highways Agency so they can repair it and reopen it.

We are very aware of the disruption but we need to make sure every stone is uncovered.

The relatives need to know as much as possible about what happened in the last moments of their loved ones' lives while we have the chance.

We will all be affected by this. Once all the names come out, I’m sure everybody will know somebody who knows someone involved.

We know first-hand how people are affected by it but we can’t know the same level of grief.

I think the long-term effects of this will affect the community for many years to come. It’s bound to- it’s a very sad day for Sussex.

This incident has been described as the biggest peacetime disaster Sussex has witnessed. We didn’t realise that at the time but we did know it was something extremely traumatic and serious.

I have talked to my family about it - my wife and two children - and they are very supportive.

Of course, I can only tell them so much but I am lucky that the fire service is my family as well.