Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (38 page)

Like the Venus attended by Jason Henry, the little girl Collins saw was perfect. “She was our son’s age,” Collins said, “and she had on the same Nike tight biking shorts that he wore. They were black with a blue and white stripe up the side of the leg. And they were kind of Spandex, kind of tight fitting. And every other fingernail was painted blue like a little kid would do.” The girl was striking, because like Jane Doe, she seemed completely uninjured. She was barefoot. Her dark-brown hair was shoulder length. She wore two braided string friendship bracelets. “Beautiful, beautiful girl. Just a beautiful little girl that you or I would love to take home,” said Collins. That face was still rising up before Collins more than two decades after the crash.

“And then the gums and the entire teeth [were] sawed out,” Collins said. “That was put into a plastic bag. After they did the jaw and the teeth were extracted, then they went into another area, which I did not watch, but they took all the fingertips.” Fingerprints were actually taken first: “And then from there, the body went into a holding area. My [identifying] sheet was attached to the bag, and the body parts were put into the bag, the bag was zipped and [wheeled] into an embalming area, and they were laid just right in a file—one, two, three, four, five—right down the rows.”

She said that what impressed her most was the respect with which she felt the bodies were treated. “There was very, very little talking. We treated these bodies like it was our mother or our father. One of the bodies came in, and there was a cricket on it. And so I didn’t say anything but I pointed to one of the helpers and I just kind of shook my head, and they went and took that cricket off. We had utmost respect for the bodies.”

Robert Monserrate of the DCI
also worked in the morgue and said nearly the same words. At the prayer service for the first anniversary of the crash, a man and his son approached Monserrate and asked how the investigators knew that the badly burned body the family had received in a casket was the boy’s mother, the man’s wife. “We sat down at one of the tables and I told him how we recovered the bodies from the runway, the plane. How we transported the remains to the morgue, how we photographed the bodies, looked for any identifiable marks or jewelry, how we did the dental [identification], X-rays, fingerprints and such. How we had the utmost respect for all their loved ones, how we assigned a person to follow their loved one through the identification process and how there was no question in my mind as to our accuracy in identifying everyone.”

After accompanying five bodies on the day after the crash, Collins threw away her gloves, washed her hands, and sat idle in a separate room. “We did five bodies. Then we would take a forty-five-minute break. Five bodies, forty-five-minute break. And I did this for two days.” She said everyone in the break room was contemplative and sad. “We felt that we were fulfilling a mission, felt that we were doing good, but it was a very sad time. And we smelled. The bodies that came in, they reeked with jet fuel. The bodies had not started to decay, but the odor from the jet fuel was horrible.”

Collins said that working in the morgue, seeing the gruesome things she saw, caused no psychological trauma in the long run. Her husband Dick was in the Air National Guard, and he worked on a search team looking for bodies in the cornfields. At home in the evenings, they showered to try to rid themselves of the smell and then sat talking quietly together, sharing their experiences from the day. They became each other’s psychological counselors. They sought no outside help and had no ongoing emotional troubles. She attributes this in part to her Christian faith and in part to the sense of a sacred mission that she felt in her work. “When they got done,” she said of the morticians, “they would fold the people’s hands over their stomachs. Everything was done very, very tactfully and very—really, devoutly. I’m a pretty strong Christian, and there’s a lot of things about this that are so beautiful of the respect for the human body, and we did that to the fullest.”

J. Kenneth Berkemier
, a funeral director from Sioux City, helped in that process. He rolled his eyes when he contemplated the volumes of paperwork that needed to be completed. He was sixty-one at the time of the crash and owned a cemetery as well as a mortuary business. He dealt with many bodies in his career, but never so many all at once. “We had a staff of funeral directors,” he said, “funeral directors’ wives, funeral directors’ mothers,” and here he laughed. He had thinning brown hair in a dramatic comb-over and wore oversized glasses and a suit and tie that made him look very much the picture of a funeral director. He said they recruited “anyone who would be familiar with the technicalities of death certificates, burial permits, transit permits, cremation permits, all the necessary things that had to be done before that body could go out. And those things all had to be produced and double-checked last minute.” Those documents then had to be put with the shipping papers and sent out to the location on the airfield where the body was placed in a casket. Although all the workers in the morgue were dressed in the most casual way, the funeral directors wore suits in the July heat out of respect for the dead. They drove the bodies one by one in hearses. The first bodies were recovered from the field on Thursday, July 20. By Sunday, all but three of the dead had been identified. Those three were identified on Monday.

As Patricia Collins and her team brought bodies to him, Berkemier dispatched them for embalming. Burned bodies were placed in a container called a Ziegler case, which is a casket of 20 gauge steel with a channel gasket in the lid that allows it to be hermetically sealed against the smell that Margo Crain and others would never forget. The Ziegler case was put inside a conventional casket, “and in this instance, we used sealed caskets also,” Berkemier said, “so those bodies were double sealed.” The casket was placed in a shipping case, all of the paperwork attached, and then the body was either flown directly out of Sioux City or transported by hearse to Omaha, Nebraska, or Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for shipping home to the family.

Collins said that she wanted to make sure that the families of those who lost their lives in the wreck of 1819 Uniform would “realize that we took the best care of their people. I did it joyfully and sadfully. I was very happy to do it, but it was a very sad thing. It was a sad day, a very sad day. And it was very humbling, and it’s a day I’ll never forget.”

Monserrate said that having the opportunity to explain to the father and son what had become of the wife and mother was therapeutic for him as well. “
I know that he was very happy to learn
the facts of what we did and how we took care of their loved ones. What he did not know was how much he really helped me and met my need to know that we made a difference and helped bring closure to families that lost loved ones out there.”

Ellen and Adrienne Badis were on their way home
from Honolulu to the East Coast by way of Denver and Chicago. Ellen was about to turn thirty-six, and Adrienne had recently turned forty. They traveled with their two children, Eric, six, and Aaron, two and a half. Ellen wore a pale-blue sleeveless sundress, and Adrienne wore a striped dress shirt and black slacks. Ellen was thin and pretty with light brown hair. Dark and round-faced, Adrienne looked the Filipino he was. The couple doted on their two boys. Before they left for the Honolulu airport, they posed for a portrait wearing leis of pink flowers with the sunlit sea behind them. Ellen wore a small lei as a headband.

When they arrived at the terminal, they discovered that their plane had mechanical trouble and was not going to take off. By the time they arrived in Denver the next morning, most of the eastbound flights were fully booked. The only seats available were on United Flight 232. Moreover, the seats weren’t together. Ellen and Aaron wound up in B-Zone, while Adrienne and Eric were in C-Zone. Eric had been given 23-G, and Adrienne was supposed to be seated in row 28. Hoping for the best, Adrienne led Eric back to row 28 and sat in the vacant seat beside him, 28-F. When Jerry Schemmel arrived, annoyed to see someone in his seat, Adrienne asked, “Do you have 28-F?”

Trying not to let all the frustration show from his long morning of delays, Schemmel said yes, it was his seat.

“This is my son,” Adrienne said. “He’s supposed to be in 23-G. We’d like to sit together. Would you mind taking 23-G? It’s an aisle seat.”

“
Sure,” said Schemmel
. “No problem.” He trudged forward to take Eric’s seat, and probably saved the boy’s life by doing so.

Eleven rows ahead of her husband, Ellen was concerned that her fidgety two-year-old was bothering Pete Wernick and his wife Joan. She switched seats with Aaron. When the engine blew, Ellen told me, “It was the loudest noise I’ve ever heard, still to this day.” Although the plane climbed right after the explosion, her perception was that it “just nose-dived,” as she put it.
*
“We immediately went down a mile, five thousand feet. And I thought that was it, we were all going, we were going to crash. And I started praying.” Ellen broke down weeping, almost unable to get the next few words out. “And then he gained control of the plane.” She gasped for breath, reliving the terrible moment, as she said, “and we leveled off . . .” Joan Wernick tried to reassure Ellen, telling her that planes can fly with two engines or even with only one. As Ellen watched the flight attendants telling mothers to put their children on the floor, she silently gave thanks that she and her husband had bought tickets for their children. She put a pillow beneath Aaron’s seatbelt, and Aaron almost immediately fell asleep with gum in his mouth. As the plane neared Sioux City, Sharon Bayless, sitting across the aisle, leaned over and suggested that Ellen remove Aaron’s gum.

“I felt terrible that I’d left gum in his mouth,” Ellen said. “He was asleep and he’s a child and a toddler at that.” As she described to me what happened next, her voice became a low growl, as if she were struggling to push the words out, and those words became almost like a sad lamenting song. “I went down as far as I could and, and, and braced, and when we hit, I just, ah, said, oh, the sound is just more that you’ll never forget, the sound of metal shrieking and of earth and dirt and the smell of the, of the rubber, and the, the, the fumes and the, um, it’s just, uh, something we’ll never forget, but, ah . . . And it was just so long. Just, it was just terrible. So I said, ‘Oh, gosh. We—have—crashed,’ you know. And then, and then—there was this . . .
smooth
. . . No more noise!” Here Ellen’s voice became almost jubilant. “It was . . . I, and I thought to myself, ‘Oh, my gosh, if this is—I’m going to heaven! This is—if this is it, then this is wonderful!’ And then it came back again—the noise, the same noise. And it went on, and it seemed to go on and on and aw, I just could not, aw! I—and then after that—” Ellen’s voice collapsed in on itself, as she ran out of words. She said she thought she might have lost consciousness in her seat.

Her next memory was the sound of Aaron screaming. She thought, “Oh, my gosh—I’m alive!” She looked to her left and saw Pete and Joan and their six-year-old son Will, a few weeks from his seventh birthday, and saw that they seemed uninjured. “We were all squished, leaning forward. We could not lean back.” Her senses were not her own. She found that she was looking at Aaron’s toes. His legs seemed to dangle up toward the ceiling. “It was dark,” she said, “but I had some light that I could see that his profile was there. And I heard him crying, so I knew that he was okay.” But her mind was awash in confusion as she thought, “Oh, gosh, what—what do we do? What do I do? How do we get out of this—How do we get out of these seat belts? What? Somebody help me! Because there we were, dangling from these seat belts, which were, of course, our lifesavers.” She had yet to realize that she was upside down. She “fumbled and fumbled and got up in there where the belt buckle was up in our stomachs and I finally got it opened and fell—oh, my gosh! Fell down, and then I just didn’t—I just didn’t know what to do. I was just starting to say, ‘Somebody help me, please, help me with my son!’ ”

People were now dropping from their seats in twos and threes. The crowd of bodies quickly became impenetrable amid the debris. What had been the left side was now the right, and the people a few rows back were trapped in the crushed ceiling as the plane filled with smoke. The people around Ellen began struggling and crawling toward the light, so Pete and Will Wernick and Ellen found themselves caught up in this mass of protoplasm, squirming in the disturbed hive. “And there were wires,” Ellen said, “and there were bodies and lots of wires, and then I got to the opening and then there was corn. And then I jumped, and then I looked, and I just can’t believe I didn’t have my child.” She had somehow escaped the burning ship without her two-year-old. Aaron hung somewhere inside that dark interior, dangling from his seat belt like a ham.

*
Although the plane climbed three hundred feet immediately after the explosion, many people had the sensation that it dove.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

J
ohn C. Clark, the senior performance engineer
from the Bureau of Technology at the NTSB, arrived in Sioux City on July 20 to search for fan disk 00385. Clark, along with Edward Wizniak, William Thompson, Robert MacIntosh, and others, paid a visit to Dennis Swanstrom, the base commander, and informed him that critical parts were missing out in the cornfields around Alta, Iowa. “
And within ten minutes
,” recalled Thompson, “his forces were at work acting.” From that point on, Swanstrom, Harrington, and the Air National Guard would play a key role in aiding Clark’s search for the missing disk. Based on what the NTSB and GE had seen of the number two engine, one thing was clear: if they wanted to pinpoint the cause of the accident, they had to find the missing disk. They strongly suspected that it lay in two big pieces in a field about sixty miles northeast of Sioux City, on ground obscured by midsummer crops.

Clark, forty-one, was an experienced investigator and well aware of the history of titanium rotating parts blowing up. If people wanted modern air travel, they had to spin big heavy wheels. And if they spun big heavy wheels, they would have to accept that some of them would fly apart now and then, as such wheels had done from the beginning. But Clark had never seen a situation in which the number one fan vanished, along with a good portion of its shaft and attachments. He already had parts from the airplane that farmers had found and some reports from those who had seen components falling from the plane about eight miles north of the town of Alta. Other pieces were sighted about two miles east of Highway M31, which runs north and south along the western edge of Alta. The lighter materials would have drifted with the winds of the upper atmosphere. Clark immediately ordered all the meteorological information that was available. The wind had been roughly from the north, blowing forty knots at thirty-seven thousand feet. Some of the lighter debris was found to have drifted to the southeast from the point of the explosion, while a piece of the airplane’s aluminum skin was found a mile north of Alta on the west side of M31. Clark was eventually able to confirm the speed of the winds aloft by looking at the radar data. As 1819 Uniform turned from east to north, Clark would learn, there was a drop in its ground speed consistent with a headwind of roughly the correct velocity.