Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (20 page)

As the day wore on, Harrington called Marx Truck Trailer Sales in Sioux City and another company called Acme to ask about renting refrigerated tractor-trailer trucks. They would be parked right outside Hangar 252. Those trucks would be used to refrigerate the dead.

*
A cycle equals roughly one takeoff and landing.

CHAPTER TEN

I
n 1989, the
Sioux City Journal
was an old-fashioned daily newspaper steeped in a tradition that began in the 1860s. By necessity, all thirty-one staffers wore many hats. Marcia Poole was food editor and responsible for the Sunday Living section as well. “We were vacation thin, of course, in July,” she recalled. Four reporters were on duty, along with three photographers and two interns.

Cal Olson, the editor, was a character right out of central casting in Hollywood. With a generous head of wavy hair, and not much pepper left amid the salt, he had a vigorously frank and friendly face. He wore sharp conservative suits and big glasses that accented his black bushy eyebrows. His smirk could either wither you or fill you with warm confidence, depending on what you had done to deserve it. He made a habit of asking his reporters, “How does it smell out there?”

Poole had returned from interviewing a poor family that was trying to make the most of its budget for food. She had stopped in at Dean’s Drug Cafe to order a grilled cheese sandwich and a Coke to go and hurried back to the paper to write her story. She could barely hear the murmuring police scanner, which sat on the desk of one of the newsmen. The city editor, Glenn Olson (no relation to Cal), had been listening when the distinctive musical tones signaling an Alert Two came over the air. It was becoming apparent that a jumbo jet was in genuine distress, as the scanner picked up increasingly alarming chatter from police and fire departments. The musical tones now announced Alert Three status. Poole left her frustrating story and her sandwich and crossed the room to the scanner. She knew that jumbo jets didn’t land at Sioux City. As the skeleton staff gathered around, word came over the air that the plane might have to land on U.S. Highway 20.

Glenn Olson picked up the phone and called the new library, where John Quinlan, a reporter, and a photographer named Gary Anderson were covering a news conference about the opening of the nearly completed building. Someone at the library called Quinlan to the phone, and the city editor barked, “Get back to the newsroom.” Even as Quinlan and Anderson drove the short distance from the library to the
Journal
offices, Ed Porter, a photographer at the paper, was sitting in his car in front of the old Carnegie library, listening to his police scanner. Mark Fageol, the chief photographer, also heard the announcement that the plane might land on a road. Porter put his car in gear and headed straight for the airport, while Fageol headed out of town on Highway 20.

As Poole and the staff listened to radio chatter, Cal Olson stepped out of his office and said to the newsroom in general, “Get your stuff and get out to the airport. I don’t care what you’re doing, just drop it.”

Even though Mark Reinders was a copy editor, he left for the airport. “I had no idea what I was going to be doing.” But he knew that Marcia had sent an intern, Shari Zenor, a girl of barely college age, to the fire department to write a feature story for the Living section on a typical day in the life of a fire fighter—what Cal Olson called a popcorn piece, pure filler. Chances were that nothing at all would happen, and she would struggle to fill the space describing yawning firemen watching daytime television. The high point of the story would be a firehouse lunch. Now Reinders couldn’t imagine where the poor kid would wind up.

Poole, in a kind of daze, ran out of the newsroom and into the street, still not convinced that a DC-10 could be coming their way. Standing before the
Journal
building, she found herself looking at the sight that caught Greg Clapper’s attention as he led his family to the movie theater to see
Peter Pan
. “I could see the plane riding low to the southeast,” she said. She watched 1819 Uniform vanish behind the intervening buildings. The town seemed completely silent, as it does after a deep winter snow. She heaved a sigh of relief. They had made it in safely.
Thank God
, she thought.

Minutes before, Gary Anderson had rushed into the
Journal
building to get his telephoto lens. He was now going seventy miles an hour on Interstate 29 north of the airport, and at the same moment when Clapper and Poole saw the plane, Anderson too saw it out his window. Without taking his foot off the accelerator, he picked up the Nikon F2 and began firing off frames with the motor drive. The silhouetted shape, shark-like and huge, rose over the bluffs, ballooned above the Southern Hills Mall, and dragged in over the intervening trees. As he fired away, he kept thinking that everything would turn out all right, making a good tight local story with a happy ending.

He cranked the steering wheel over and stopped on the shoulder. He leapt out. He could see the DC-10 vanish behind a hill. As he brought the camera to his eye, “I got the fireball,” he later recounted, “then I felt sick thinking there were a lot of people dead, right at that moment, right there. How could anybody be alive?”

Bill Zahren, a young reporter, stood with fire fighters at the south end of the airport and watched 1819 Uniform come in low and fast. He lost sight of it behind a building, “and I heard this rumble like a tympani drum, and I saw the wing shoot up in the air and saw fire running off the wing like water runs off a butter knife,” he said. Zahren began running toward the terminal. When he reached the fence beside the building, he saw Dave Boxum, a cameraman from KTIV TV, Channel 4. Standing beside his tripod and camera, his hair and eyebrows were so blond that they seemed incandescent in the sun. He looked pale and shaken.

“Hey!” Zahren called, “did you get that shit?”

“Yeah, I think so,” said Boxum, and Zahren ran on. He realized that he had to get on the field. As he ran, he recalled a story he’d recently researched about someone who had built his own airplane. He had met him at Graham Aviation, where all the private planes parked. He remembered how easy it was to get on the ramp. “You just had to go through a shop door, turn left, and there you were.”

Fageol had been on his way out of town on Highway 20 when a police car, lights and siren going, passed him and pulled over to the shoulder. Fageol slammed on the brakes and pulled in behind him. He stepped out with a 200-millimeter lens on his camera and aimed up at the mammoth shape passing overhead. Clearly the plane wasn’t going to land on Highway 20. The police car turned around and headed back west toward town, and Fageol followed. He was going well over the speed limit, he recalled, when a sheriff’s police car passed him as if he’d been parked.

Poole stood before the
Journal
building, watching the dome of black smoke billow into the sapphire sky and begin leaning away to the south. She went inside to tell the city editor that she’d go anywhere he needed her, as every phone in the newsroom continued ringing. She picked one up and said, “
Journal
newsroom, Marcia Poole.” She heard a scratchy, long-distance voice say, “You’re on the air!” The call was from a radio station in Toronto. Only two reporters remained unassigned, Poole and the court reporter, Kathy Hoeschen Massey, but when word came over the scanner that some people had survived the plane crash, it became immediately obvious where they should go. From previous stories she’d done, Poole already knew people at St. Luke’s Hospital, so she went there, while Massey went to Marian Health Center.

Out on the freeway, Anderson returned to his car and barely made it past the first roadblock. When he saw a second roadblock, he drove through somebody’s front yard to reach the road to the airport. Going through the main terminal would be hopeless, so he headed to the opposite side of the field where the private planes parked at Graham Aviation.

As Bill Zahren ran toward Graham, he saw Anderson. They walked through as if they knew what they were doing. As at most small airfields in the 1980s, no one stopped them.

At the same time, Ed Porter, an ex-Marine with more than thirty years of experience, was pulling up to the Air National Guard entrance on the north side of the airfield. By chance Swanstrom had issued the All Call moments before. Porter, a month shy of his fifty-fifth birthday, was swept through the gate with everyone else who was responding. The sentries weren’t even checking IDs. A bus was waiting, and Porter boarded with the rest of the Air National Guard men and women, many of whom were not in uniform. He was the only reporter on the scene with experience photographing air crashes. He had been a Marine Corps photographer from 1954 through 1957. As he put it, “I knew what the outcome was when you stick a jet into the ground.”

When the bus stopped on the debris-strewn runway, Porter emerged with the other men and women and paused for a moment on the elevated step to look out over the scene. He saw ribbons glittering and rippling across a snowscape bedecked with human bodies “and then two or three people just kind of walking. That’s the first image I remember.”

He stepped down and took a few photographs before heading across the runway toward the tail of the aircraft, which lay on Taxiway Lima. Before he reached it, a United Airlines employee accosted him, “and he and I got into a fight, because he was trying to stop me from taking pictures. The last frame I got is his hand over the lens of my camera. He was trying to take the camera away from me.” As the two struggled amid the revolving paper and ash and smoke and money, the Sioux City chief of police, Gerald Donovan, approached with several officers.

“Get them out of here,” Donovan told his officers.

No sooner had Gary Anderson run out onto the airfield than he saw the most incongruous sight: a middle-aged man in a suit, looking as if he’d stepped out of his office. The man walked right up to Anderson and said, “Have you ever seen anything like this? I was on that plane. Is there a bar around here?” Anderson could barely speak. He pointed at the terminal building. The man walked on as if nothing had happened. He was later found drinking at the bar.

Anderson continued to take photos. More and more people came wandering out of the smoke. He turned and shot and turned and shot. “
There was so much out there
,” he later said, “but I couldn’t just shoot randomly. I couldn’t panic. I had to have some sense of what I was getting and how it would all go together to tell the story.” Then he caught sight of a guardsman carrying a small blond boy unconscious in his arms. Anderson let off a burst of exposures with his motor drive. The boy’s name was Spencer Bailey, son of Frances, brother of Brandon.

Moments before, a
woman named Lynn Hartter
, forty-four, had run onto the field in the company of several other members of the Air National Guard. “We ran out there,” she said, “a whole bunch of us. There was a civilian man kneeling by this group of seats.” The bank of seats was tipped over so that the people who were strapped in were face-down on the concrete. “We went over there, and you could hear a noise. And then we realized that it was a child.” Two of the guardsmen reacted instinctively and “pulled the seats back. I mean it was just sheer adrenaline, they couldn’t have done that the next day.” Hartter squirmed up under the seats as the two men held them back. The civilian man pulled out a knife, reached up under the seats, and cut the seat belt, and three-year-old Spencer Bailey fell face-down into her arms. “And then I wiggled out and stood up and got the kid turned over.” Then she was running for an ambulance, dodging debris and bodies.

As the supervisor of flying for the Air National Guard that day, Colonel Dennis Nielsen had witnessed the crash from a distance of less than 200 yards. Now he was astonished to see any survivors at all, let alone this little boy who had been ejected from the plane, with his mother and brother, in a detached bank of seats. “Lynn Hartter was carrying him,” said Nielsen, “and there was a lot of debris on the ground. It was difficult to walk. Spencer was not a small child, and Lynn Hartter was in her mid to late forties, tiny gal. I knew Lynn, and she was stumbling through the wreckage, and she wasn’t going to make it with this child to wherever she was going, and she just yelled, ‘Colonel Nielsen, Colonel Nielsen, help me!’ And the child fell into my arms. I walked about a hundred feet or so and put Spencer into an ambulance.” During those few moments, while Nielsen relayed Spencer from Lynn’s arms to the ambulance, Gary Anderson spun and snapped off several frames with his telephoto lens.

Lieutenant Jim Walker was searching for bodies with a group of Guard men and women at the edge of the corn and happened to turn and see Nielsen carrying Spencer. “I was within twenty yards of him when he walked out of the cornfield, and I remember thinking, Man that would make a great picture. And then I was just stunned when I saw that on the front page of the newspaper.” That photograph was published around the world and became the model for a life-size bronze statue that commemorates the crash on the river walk in downtown Sioux City.
*

Anderson was barely getting started constructing his story. He had shot perhaps two dozen frames when the police came down the runway with Ed Porter. The two photographers saw each other at last.

“I think I’ve got something!” Anderson called.

“That was good enough for me,” Porter said later. His main concern was getting off the field with their film and cameras intact, “because Gary [Anderson] was hot. He was mad. I was trying to keep everything calm and collected until we could get out of there.”

Anderson said, “I was just hoping I had something in focus.” He drove back to the newsroom, marveling at the fact that he had started his day with a stultifying news conference at the library and then had been launched into “the biggest story I’ve ever covered in a matter of minutes.” And it was over almost before it began.