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As a violent storm swept across Malta a few weeks ago, Doris Doublet, 85, recalled a similar tempest during her childhood, when she spent three days anxiously awaiting news of her father, trapped by huge waves in the Ricasoli lighthouse. Toni Spiteri, who res'We all thought he was dead': the storm that kept a man trapped inside a lighthouse
As a violent storm swept across Malta a few weeks ago, Doris Doublet, 85, recalled a similar tempest during her childhood, when she spent three days anxiously awaiting news of her father, trapped by huge waves in the Ricasoli lighthouse. Toni Spiteri, who resided in Valletta, tended to lighthouses during the war and the years that followed and his daughter spent her early years growing up in one such structure at Tigné, narrowly escaping its destruction in a wartime air raid. It was some years later, in February 1949, that tragedy nearly struck again. Her father, then aged 48, had spent a normal night of work manning the Ricasoli lighthouse but, early the next morning, strong winds and huge waves smashed the glass on the upper level and broke through the doors below, flooding the entire building. With waves relentlessly crashing over the breakwater that connects the lighthouse to the mainland, he and a co-worker, Salvu Micallef, 54, of Mosta, were cut off and trapped inside. When he did not return home, Ms Doublet and her family feared the worst. “I remember my mother crying. We all thought he was dead, everyone was going around saying he had died,” she said. In an interview... Read more