Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (17 page)

The assistant fire chief, Orville Thiele, watching from the ground, radioed to his chief that he too had the plane in sight, and the commander said, “Ten-four, he’s descending now. We hope he can make it in here, but what happens when he gets in is another thing.”

Then Thiele transmitted, “He’s comin’ down real fast!”

And another shouted, “Okay, all rigs stand by!”

Then someone keyed a microphone and screamed, “He’s on fire!” and for a moment the frequency was silent as people watched in disbelief while the plane exploded and pitch-poled up onto its nose, breaking apart. Then everyone tried to talk at once, and the transmissions became unintelligible.

“Come out and give us a hand out here!” Chief Hathaway screamed. “This aircraft is gone!”

The emergency vehicles began to roll.

As the ambulances and fire trucks and pickup trucks and cars rumbled across the ramp and out onto the runway in the moments after the pieces of the plane had come to rest, the storm of papers began rising on the heat waves above the main body of the fire. The smoke and ash and debris turned in a slow rotating vortex like a mythical creature and began drifting down around the fire fighters. “
We encountered dense smoke
and a snowstorm of paper that came out of the aircraft,” said Hathaway.

Fire was eating away at the center section of the fuselage in the cornfield, where Jerry Schemmel and the ex-Navy fighter pilot Charles Martz were escaping from opposite ends. Emergency vehicles trying to reach the burning wreckage were stopped by the debris and by survivors who were wandering around in shock. A fire fighter named Larry Niehus drove a crash truck while another fire fighter named Jerry Logemann walked ahead of the truck to move debris and allow Niehus to reach the main section of the fuselage, where Rod Vetter and Margo Crain, John Transue and Bruce Benham and Garry Priest, Clif Marshall, and Ron Sheldon, among others, were popping their seat belts and dropping to the ceiling of the inverted coach cabin.

“
It was very hot
,” said Bob Hamilton, “because we had a running fuel fire inside the aircraft from the ruptured fuel tanks.” He estimated that the fire was burning at 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. He said that although the fire fighters knew where the fuel tanks were, they could not pinpoint all the pressurized containers in the plane, such as fire extinguishers and oxygen bottles. “There were numerous explosions during the fire and this did pose a serious hazard to our fire fighters.”

As Niehus and Logemann began spraying foam on the fire, trying to knock it down, they sprayed the passengers as they came out the rear of the plane, thus protecting them from the flames as well as they could. The two men soon realized that they were going to have to fight the fire the same way they fought house fires: they would need to put on their silver proximity gear with self-contained breathing equipment. As Niehus crossed the ground between his truck and the fuselage, Records was looking out from the crushed cockpit and likely saw him. Niehus passed the cockpit, heading into the burning fuselage dragging a hand line. The belly tank above and forward of him was pouring fuel on the fire he was trying to fight. As he worked, he grabbed people and pulled them out as fast as he could. Some were already free of their seats, but he had to reach up and cut seat belts to release others. Fire fighters outside the fuselage took the people as Niehus dragged them out. “We had pulled a couple of little kids out of there,” Niehus remembered, “and one of them, a little girl, was about the age of my daughter at that time, and I had a really hard time with that.” She was dead in his arms, and he was still thinking about her more than twenty years later. He said that while he was inside, fighting the fire with a hand line and dragging passengers, dead and alive, out of the plane, the fuselage was melting in on him. It gradually closed around him, forcing him to back out. “It was collapsing all the way around,” he said. “It got to where we couldn’t see the passengers anymore, and it was pretty much collapsed down to where you couldn’t actually get into it.” He could no longer help those who were left inside. Their one avenue of escape had closed.

Meanwhile, staff members at the hospitals were preparing to receive casualties. In the minutes before the crash, nurses at Marian Health Center lined the halls with gurneys, IV stands, drugs, dressings for wounds, IV kits, surgical packs, and sterile linens in anticipation of the arrival of wounded passengers. All patients who could be released were sent home to make more beds available. All elective surgery was canceled. The same scene was being repeated at St. Luke’s, the other hospital in town. Between four o’clock in the afternoon and nine o’clock that night, the
food service staff began carrying out
the two-day emergency menu plan by making seven hundred sandwiches and distributing them, along with eight hundred cans of soda and forty dozen cookies. The first patients arrived within twenty minutes of the crash, as helicopters landed on the pad at Marian and ambulances screamed up to the emergency room doors at St. Luke’s. The first two patients to reach St. Luke’s were children. At one point Cathie Deck from the Community Relations Department at St. Luke’s was holding a telephone to each ear, giving simultaneous interviews to reporters in Japan and Australia.
Eighty-eight people arrived at Marian for treatment
. Five were pronounced dead on arrival, and an additional two died during the night.

Sheryl Dieber, a nurse at St. Luke’s, was ministering to a six-year-old boy in traction. The boy motioned to Dieber to come close. “
I’ll tell you a secret
,” he said. “Get closer.” She moved closer. “Come closer,” the boy insisted, and Dieber leaned in. “Come closer,” the boy said again, and she put her ear right up to his lips. “My mommy died in the plane crash,” the boy whispered. And together they wept. The little boy was Brandon Bailey, son of Frances, brother of Spencer.

The
acting Woodbury County medical examiner, Dr. Gene Herbek
, felt overwhelmed by the job before him: he’d been told to expect two hundred victims or more and wasn’t sure how to handle that many. “When I got to the scene, the numbers quickly reduced to 120, which is still a large number,” Herbek recalled. “The victims who were on the field, their injuries were of severe trauma. Just tremendous force injuries, broken bones, head injuries, neck injuries.” Herbek realized fairly quickly that the bodies would have to be left on the field for the night. Others would independently reach the same conclusion. The sun was going down. No one had the ability to assemble the people and equipment needed to begin recovering bodies before nightfall. They could not work in the dark. They might make mistakes in identifying bodies. People might be injured on shredded metal. In any event, there was nowhere for the bodies to go. No morgue yet existed. As much as United Airlines and McDonnell Douglas and General Electric wanted the dead out of sight, it was not yet possible. As Herbek characterized it, “That’s one of the things I had done that was very unpopular with a lot of people. Fortunately, it was a cool night.” By morning, the temperature had dropped to 59 degrees. “The thing that I had learned in my training,” he said, “was that you wanted to leave things where they were and that included all personal effects.”

Some time that afternoon, a forensic pathologist
named Brad Randall, thirty-eight, had been at his office in Sioux Falls, “doing pathology things,” as he put it, when someone came in and asked if he had heard about the plane crash. He had not. He turned on his radio and listened for a while. Then he picked up the phone and called the Iowa Department of Public Safety (DPS), under whose authority the medical examiner operated at that time. Dr. Thomas Bennett, the state medical examiner, was testifying in another state, and someone at the Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation (DCI), a part of DPS, urged Randall to volunteer. He made the hour-long drive south to Sioux City and was directed to a conference room at Graham Aviation, the hangar where private planes were serviced. There he found “several people sitting, standing, somewhat confusedly. Gene Herbek was very happy to see me show up.” In fact, Herbek asked Randall to be the director of the morgue, and Bennett later approved of that decision.

At about six o’clock that first evening, Herbek took Randall, along with a woman named Marliss DeJong, on a tour of the wreckage to try to anticipate what lay ahead. Herbek knew that they would have to create a reference system of some sort to map the location of each body and body part on the field. A fifty-two-year-old lieutenant colonel named Lawrence Harrington, joining the tour along with Gary Brown, would be instrumental in arranging for all the equipment the mortuary team would need. As Randall explained to me later, when he saw the condition of the charred fuselage, he said, “Oh, my. This is going to be an archeological operation. We’re going to have to get down there and start sifting through all this ash for bones.” Then someone told him that nearly everyone in the section he was looking at had survived. This was where Margo Crain, Rod Vetter, Ron Sheldon, Clif Marshall, Aki Muto, Gitte Skaanes, and Sister Mary Viannea had been sitting. Randall was astonished.

Once they returned to the conference room, Herbek gave Randall his blessing and told him to take anyone he needed and go to another conference room to work out how the morgue was going to be run from start to finish. During that organizational breakout session, Randall remembered one of the most prominent forensic dentists in America, E. Steven Smith from Northwestern University. The year before, Smith had come to Sioux City to give a talk at a seminar that Randall held. Smith’s talk had been about responding to mass casualties. He had even warned the attendees that since Sioux City was in the middle of the nation, it was beneath the flight path of thousands of aircraft and could well find itself facing the crash of a large plane one day. Now Randall told the group in the breakout session, “I know who I can call. [Steven Smith] can put a whole team together and be here tomorrow.”

Randall later said, “I just made one phone call to him, and he said, ‘I’ve got it handled.’ ”

He recounted how the operation got organized. “One of those people [who] deserves more credit than anybody else in this whole thing is Marliss DeJong.” United States Senator Chuck Grassley kept an office in Sioux City.
DeJong worked there
as a liaison between local communities and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. She was also on the board of the Red Cross and a member of the local Emergency Planning Committee. She was well known for her organizational skills, and it was said around Sioux City that if you wanted a stickler for paperwork, you sought out Marliss DeJong. Now she went off with Brad Randall to formulate a plan for setting up and operating the morgue. “She knew how to make information flow between places and to secure things and to make sure that stuff didn’t get screwed up in a bureaucratic mess,” said Randall. “And I knew that the worst mistake that we could make was to do something quickly.”

At about nine that night, Randall and DeJong began diagramming how a deceased person would be wheeled in, then inventoried, along with any clothing and possessions. The person would have to be photographed and x-rayed and fingerprinted. Each process was added to the developing flow chart, even as Randall and DeJong discussed how information would be collected and filed and protected. DeJong conceived a scheme for making sure that each file of paperwork remained with the correct body so that under no circumstances could the identities of two people be switched. If someone requested paperwork, it would be photocopied. The original would remain in the file. With this system in place, with the flow chart they had created for the morgue, and now with Steven Smith’s resources on the way, it had begun to appear as if the task of processing the dead might be possible.

In the meantime, the base commander for the Air National Guard, Colonel Dennis Swanstrom, forty-six, in consultation with his right-hand man, Lawrence Harrington, began making arrangements to convert the physical space of the fuel cell hangar into a temporary morgue. During all their planning and training, Gary Brown and his team at WCDES had designated Hangar 252 for mortuary operations. It was ordinarily used to repair fuel cells for the A-7s. Now that the real disaster was upon them, Herbek recalled, “that’s one thing that we didn’t have to worry about or think about, and believe me, having that worry out of the way was a very, very big help.” Hangar 252 was in a fairly remote location on the military base and was easy to cordon off. It had a concrete floor with drains in it. The large hangar doors could be opened for ventilation, and movable partitions could be brought in to divide the giant room into protected areas for each step in the postmortem procedure. Herbek called it “ideal. . . . The disaster committee planned well.” In addition, a double-wide house trailer, or modular home, was already parked north of the hangar. Swanstrom and Harrington turned it over to Herbek to use as office space.

Harrington, Gary Brown, DeJong, and others in the meantime began ordering banks of telephones and dividers to partition off the open space, as well as all the myriad people, tools, and equipment needed for the task before them. (Greg Finzen, the Executive Director of the American Red Cross chapter in Sioux City, was out on the field within minutes of the crash on Wednesday, and through the following days would be instrumental in sending his people not only to work in the morgue but to provide food services there and at other locations, as well as to bring supplies to any person or working group that might need them.)

At about ten o’clock that evening, Randall recalled, “the doors opened and a group of suits came in and announced themselves as United Airlines representatives and told us that we needed to start body recovery
right now
.”

“It’s the middle of the night,” Randall told them.

The United spokesman said, “We don’t care. We’ll get lights out. We’ll get whatever you want. We want those bodies out of there right now.”

“We very politely told them,” Randall said, “that they could go . . .” And here he implied telling them something impolite indeed, but in our conversation he said only the word “whatever.” He went on: “And they did. They huffed and they puffed and then they left. It was clear they did not want those bodies left . . . for all the press to see the next day.”