Witness describes ‘absolutely horrific’ scenepublished at 09:40 BST<\/p>\n
09:40 BST<\/p>\n
Rita Coombs, who lives in West Mersea, says she saw emergency services treating a group of people on the beach.<\/p>\n
She says three people appeared to be receiving CPR.<\/p>\n
“It was absolutely horrific. I can’t praise the emergency services [enough], it was beyond all belief, they worked so hard.”<\/p>\n
She says she tried to support the emergency services during the “nightmare that was unfolding”. <\/p>\n
“The feeling was we just wanted to go out and help. Our hearts were going out to these people fighting for their lives.”<\/p>\n
She said the whole island feels “very quiet” this morning. <\/p>\n
“It’s a very sad island at the moment. <\/p>\n
“We’re just sending our thoughts to the people that have passed and the people left behind. It’s tragic, absolutely tragic.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Witness describes ‘absolutely horrific’ scenepublished at 09:40 BST 09:40 BST Rita Coombs, who lives in West Mersea, says…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":564044,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-564043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=564043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/564044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=564043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=564043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=564043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}