Donald Bogie is in charge of road maintenance with Dumfries and Galloway Council but on Monday he will be responsible for memorial services in a small Scottish town.
The citizens of Lockerbie have tried to keep their ceremony minor key. They need no reminder of the night Pan Am flight 103 blew apart in the sky above their town killing 259 passengers and crew as well as 11 local residents.
'We will never forget what happened, none of us will ever be able to forget that night, but it's just very difficult for us to move forward while so many people keep harking back,' Mr Bogie said.
One of the first officials to arrive on the scene of Britain's worst air disaster on the night of December 21, 1988, Mr Bogie was responsible for helping to collect bodies gathered from a trail of wreckage covering 2,210 square kilometres. He was put in charge of erecting a temporary mortuary where the bodies of passengers and crew were laid alongside those of locals killed by burning debris which fell on their homes.
'I was involved from the very first minute. As soon as I arrived I was working to try to sort out what had to be done and trying to piece things together. There were the bodies first of all that had to be taken care of and then we collected people's possessions,' he said.
But now, as international interest in the incident is renewed by the prospect of a trial in the Netherlands of two Libyans believed to be responsible for planting a bomb on the aircraft, Mr Bogie like many others in Lockerbie is trying to put the disaster behind him.
'Every year at the anniversary we get people flooding in here but really most people in Lockerbie just don't want to talk about what happened any more. There's nothing for people to see apart from the memorials, but people still come asking to see the crater where the wreckage landed,' he said.