It was one of Dundee’s biggest fires, with flames lighting up the city sky.
Now, 13 years on, The Courier can reveal for the first time the full story of the events leading up to the Morgan Academy fire from the last man on the roof where it started.
The roofer, now 70, said hardly a day goes by without him thinking about it and he now wants to tell his story about the fire which destroyed the 133-year-old building and left the school needing a£20 million rebuild.
The former Dundee Contracts employee, who still feels unable to be identified and asked not to be named, said he cried after he tried to return to work after a period off sick.
He said the fire has “haunted me for years” and insisted a “huge injustice” was done to him.
He thinks he was used as a scapegoat for the council.
He also revealed there was no safety plan in place for the “torch-on” method which involves heating the roofing felt with blowtorches prior to laying it work which is being held up as the cause of the devastating fire in March 2001.
The roofer said since the blaze, people have continually come up to him over the years and said: “You’re the man who started the Morgan fire.”
The roof felter revealed he lodged a freedom of information request and discovered that, in a witness statement to the police, it was stated no safety plan for the work was in place before it started,
The council manager responsible for the planned maintenance programmes for property, owned by the council’s education department, said in the witness statement that despite repeated requests from him to the contractor, no safety plan had been received before the fire.
The high-level council official also told police the first he knew that work had started was after he heard about the blaze.
The roof felter said he and his charge-hand were told to start the project the day before the fire, however, and had been up at the building with the roofing materials prior to laying the felt early on the fateful day.
The roofer told The Courier: “I just want to clear my name, I feel like everybody blamed me for it, even though nobody knows how it really started.
“But we said at the time that we didn’t like the torch-on method. And there wasn’t a safety plan in place when we started work.
“We were told to just get on with the job. We were on the job at 8am.
“There was a bit of snow about so we stopped and then started again. We were making the roof watertight and I was the last up there at about 4pm. I was only doing what they told me to do, nothing more.
“When I heard about the fire, I rushed straight back and the first person I met was my minister, the Rev Jim Wilson of Trinity Church.
“He asked me what I was doing there and I said: I was the last man off that roof.
“The last 13 years have been really difficult for me. I was off on the sick after the fire for about two or three months and the first thing the council did when I came back was put me back doing the same thing at another school.
“I told them I couldn’t do it and was off on the sick again. A union official blamed me for the fire, but what can you do? The council didn’t follow procedures.
“When I went back I asked to be moved to the cleansing department. I was there until I retired in 2008 and I never had a day off.
“I just want people to know the truth now there wasn’t a safety plan in place and we started work too early.”
A Dundee City Council spokesman said: “The council fully assisted the investigations that were carried out by Tayside Police and Tayside Fire Brigade following the fire in 2001.”
Additional reporting by Andrew Liddle