1985 Westdene Dam Tragedy – police photographer revisits
Nico Paizes still keeps a file at home of the case and newspaper clippings of articles written about that dreadful day.
Whenever an incident occurs that requires a police investigation, an official photographer will be sent to the scene. For the Westdene bus tragedy (March 27, 1985), Nico Paizes was on duty and captured some haunting images.
His photos were used in the court case to try and determine what had caused this terrible tragedy. No cause was ever discovered and the driver was cleared of all charges.
“You can’t get involved emotionally whilst taking the pictures. If you do, you would not be able to do your work. But this day was extremely difficult to shoot. When children are involved, it is always hard.”
“As a police photographer I had already seen many gruesome or difficult scenes so was somewhat hardened but the scale of this tragedy with so many children losing their lives was tough.”
He described the scene on arrival as organised chaos with crowds of people looking onto quite a small scene. “It was a very serious scene but not a large one like one would see for an aircraft crash for example. It was just a bridge, a bus and a dam.”
“I arrived at around 3 pm, I think. I’ll never forget it. All the children who did not survive had already been brought in from the water and were lying on the road. Survivors had been taken to the hospital and the bus was still in the water.”
“Even though there were large crowds of people around, the dam was eerily quiet.”
He and his colleagues worked into the night and returned the next morning to photograph the bus to look for damage or clues.
They identified points of interest surrounding the investigation at the scene in order to photograph them. “This included taking aerial pictures of where the bus veered off the bridge into the water and where it sank.”
“This was one of several special cases that I keep files of with me at home. I also cut out all the newspaper articles I can find about it which I look back on from time to time.”
Paizes lives in the same house in Germiston that he bought in 1980 and retired in 2012 after 37 years in the police force.
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