Woman who fled Cameron House fire 'feared for life' as she crawled to escape

dailyrecord.co.uk:

A woman fleeing a burning hotel feared for her life as she crawled through through thick, black smoke, an inquiry has heard.Pauline Booth, 52, and her husband, Scott, escaped the blaze at the five-star Cameron House Hotel in December 2017.The inferno claimed the lives of Simon Midgley, 32, and his partner, Richard Dyson, 38, from London.A Fatal Accident Inquiry into the fire at the hotel on the banks of Loch Lomond, near Balloch, is being held at Paisley Sheriff Court.Mrs Booth was woken by a “piercing” fire alarm in the early hours of Monday December 18 2017.The inquiry heard she told her husband: “I jumped up and looked out the window and saw black smoke.

I said, “quick, quick, we need to get ready, it’s definitely a real fire.”Upon exiting her room, Mrs Booth said the smoke made it difficult to see a clear escape route. “The smoke was really dense, it was black and it was heavy,” she told the inquiry.“We were on the floor, looking for the main staircase, crawling below the smoke.”She told the inquiry that the smoke was around a “metre from the floor”.Upon arriving at the main stairway, the couple realised they could not go any further as they could see the fire from the bottom of the stairway.The couple turned around, again, crawling below the smoke and feeling for an exit.“We thought we were trapped,” Mrs Booth recalled.“We didn’t know there was another exit and we knew we couldn’t get out another way.“It felt like I was in there a long time because I was having to feel around and couldn’t see, trying to find an opening for a door.“I eventually found what must have been a fire door.“As soon as we got through that door it was like a different world.