6 Homes Vanish in 30-Ft. Hole Cut by Jetliner

At the base of this hillside town Thursday was a 30-foot-deep gash surrounded by mounds of brown upturned dirt, as though the earth had been violently tilled with a ghastly giant plow.

Chief Constable John Boyd of Dumfries, the town 10 miles to the southwest, said Thursday that at least six of the homes on Sherwood Crescent had disappeared into that terrible hole, caused by the impact of a flaming, fuel-laden, hunk of the Pan American World Airways jumbo jet that crashed here Wednesday night.

Boyd said 17 townspeople, including four children, were missing from this area alone and may also be at the bottom of the hole. He offered no hope of finding even a trace of their bodies. Other officials said a total of 22 people on the ground are believed to have been killed.

Higher up the hillside, called Mt. Tilla by the 2,500 residents of this farming and sheep-raising town in southwest Scotland, was another swath of destruction, ending in the shattered central fuselage of the Boeing 747 that carried 258 passengers and crew members to their deaths.

Bob Mitchell, 32, an unemployed forestry worker, said he had been looking out the window of a nearby home when this part of the giant craft came slashing through the neighborhood--”a big black thing, just like a lorry driving through.”

Daylight showed destruction and death scenes, arranged and stratified on the hillsides of the town like the layers of a Dantean hell, unimagined even in the flames of the night before.

At the top of Mt. Tilla, on the fairways of the town golf course and snagged in the hedges and the bramble roses along the roadside, were the bodies of passengers.

Boyd said workers were able to count 150 bodies on Thursday. But it was hard, and heart-breaking, work.

“There are pieces of bodies thrown all over the place,” an ambulance driver said. “We are just picking up pieces and putting tags on them.”

So as darkness fell, early in these northern parts, several corpses remained on the ground, including one snagged in the branches of a hawthorn bush on the hillside road just above town.

For almost everyone here, Christmas, never a really gaudy event anyway in Calvinist Scotland, has been ruined by the crash. A few people gamely lit their Christmas lights in honor of the season. But most others, like Eileen Scott, owner of a small electrical supply shop, chose to keep their lights off.

“I don’t think it is right to put on festive airs in light of what has happened,” Scott said. “It has not been a very merry Christmas for a lot of people here.”

At the Masonic Lodge in the center of town, where rescue officials held regular press briefings Thursday, the Christmas decorations were taken down and, like the bodies at the top of the hill, wrapped in white sheets to hide them from view.

The spread of the damage over an 8-mile-diameter area suggested a massive mid-air explosion that showered the airplane’s parts on the town with a deadly, red-hot rain of twisted metal.

U.S. Ambassador Charles H. Price II, who had been at the scene of the disaster since early Thursday morning, said the most stunning sight that he had witnessed was the mostly intact cockpit and first-class section of the aircraft. This large section, with its “Clipper Maid of the Seas” logo still visible on its side, was found several miles from the rest of the wreckage, suggesting that it had been blown off the front end of the aircraft in midair.

“The cockpit was sitting absolutely dead--alone,” Price said.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, visiting the crash site Thursday, said the destruction and violence were “beyond one’s imagination or comprehension” and added, “It looks even worse in daylight than it did the night before on television.”

The prime minister said she had ordered 600 men, including army and air force units, to help clear the debris and bodies.

The town name, Lockerbie, comes from the Celtic words meaning “a place of strength.” Even in the quiet region of southwest Scotland, also known as “The Borders,” Lockerbie has had a reputation in modern times as a quiet place.

According to library records here, the town had only one previous serious disaster, a train accident in 1883 that killed 13 people. For most of its history, Lockerbie was known as a way station on the “great mail road” between Carlisle and Glasgow, 60 miles northwest.

This is a sheep- and lamb-raising area, and another claim to fame for the town was its “lamb fairs,” including one, traditionally on the Thursday before Christmas, that one history book termed “the largest in Scotland at the time.”

Lockerbie has the appearance of a steady, tough, quiet town that in the American Southwest might be called hard-scrabble. At the time of the crash Wednesday, its residents were caught performing simple and routine tasks.

William McRobert, 65, a retired sawmill manager, was stringing the lights on his Christmas tree when he heard an ominous rumble like “a thunderstorm building.” Alec Halliday, 74, a hearty Scots farmer who recently moved into town, had just finished sipping “a wee bit of brandy before going off to bed.”

Practically everyone in Lockerbie remembers exactly what they were doing in the moments before the flaming, exploding jumbo jet crashed into their town and rained horror, flames and death among them Wednesday night.

So it is perhaps no wonder that on Thursday, in the shops and taverns and church halls, the people recounted to each other the moments before the crash.

“Everyone is suffering from shock over this ghastly thing,” said the Rev. James Annand, minister of the Dryfesdale Parish Church in Lockerbie. “This is a very close-knit community. One can’t say that one knows everyone in town, but almost everyone. Now, we have people going about speaking to each other in whispers.”