Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 11, 1994 TAG: 9409130043
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: HOPEWELL, PA. NOTE: ABOVE LENGTH: Long
Before they left, they put on white, plastic safety suits, with hoods and sturdy orange rubbers over their boots. On their hands went two pairs of gloves. Around their ankles and wrists went duct tape and for their face, goggles and surgical masks.
They would be combing through a densely wooded ravine strewn with the remains of 132 people - limbs and organs and body parts that had been there in the trees and on the ground since shortly after 7 o'clock Thursday night, when the USAir flight from Chicago went down in the woods here just miles from the Pittsburgh airport.
Two hours later they were back, two hours being the maximum amount of time the rescue coordinators here believe that anyone can be asked to confront devastation on the scale of Flight 427. ``The smell is getting worse,'' was all one rescue worker would say, as he stepped off the bus, numbed and blinking in the sunlight.
Saturday was day three of the cleanup and investigation of the crash, the day when the hardest part of what promises to be weeks of work began in earnest. In the coming days, National Transportation Safety Board investigators will comb the wreckage, trying to reconstruct the flight's final moments and understand what caused the plane to roll and then plummet nose-first into the woods outside Hopewell. But before that work can begin, the local medical examiner's office, assisted by dozens of emergency workers, must painstakingly pick through the wreckage, identifying and collecting the human remains.
It is a grisly process and a slow one, particularly for a crash like this one where the force of the impact was so great that it literally tore the passengers apart. But until it is completed the crash site will not be safe for the other experts to examine, and unless it is completed there will be no way to identify formally just who died in the crash.
``The bodies are treated with the utmost respect,'' said John Kaus, Allegheny County fire marshal. ``One of my best friends, my 37-year-old neighbor, was on that plane. I'm looking for him.''``What they are trying to do, for each body, is to put every piece back together so that the family can get all the pieces of the dead person,'' said Mary Case, medical examiner for St. Louis County and an official with the National Association of Medical Examiners. ``It's a realistic goal and in all of the major crashes that have happened in the past 10 to 15 years, it's a goal that has been pretty well met. It's something that requires a tremendous amount of work. But it's worthwhile.
The effort began Friday, when workers surveyed the crash site and divided it into sections. Then they set up a morgue in a hangar at an Air Force Reserve base several miles down the road and lined up three, 40-foot refrigerated tractor trailers to store and transport remains from the crash site. Finally they called in experts from around the region whose skills would be useful in the search and reconstruction process.
Several archaeologists from Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa., for example, suspended work on the Meadowcroft rock shelter, a nearby dig thought to be one of the oldest known areas of human habitation in the Western Hemisphere, to come to Hopewell. With them they brought an infrared device known as a theodolite, which is used to plot quickly and precisely the position of objects.
From the local FBI office in Pittsburgh came 10 agents specializing in fingerprint analysis, in the event that fingerprints could be taken from hands and matched with existing records or from fingerprints taken from the homes or workplaces of the victims.
Finally, four members of the dental faculty and 50 dental students from the University of Pittsburgh will help in the identification effort. Their role is expected to be crucial because jawbones and skulls are one of the few body parts strong enough to survive a crash like this. Next week the coroner's office will begin collecting the dental records of the victims, where they are available, and the dental specialists will try to match them with teeth taken from the scene. The team also will collect other previous X-rays of the victims - skulls, backs, hands or feet - which are also quite distinctive, and try to match them with X-rays of the corpses.
These tasks will consume much of the coming weeks and months. For the next few days, however, all of the effort will be at the crash site. Small flags are placed on each body part as it is discovered. Then the part is numbered, photographed, mapped, bagged, boxed and refrigerated. After a full day's work today, 60 percent of the site had been analyzed.
``We're going to be out there a while,'' said Joe Moses, director of the 97-man Delta team that did much of the searches. ``We're on shifts right now, and we'll be going back in later on.''
Around him were other rescue workers, recovering with cups of coffee. Salvation Army workers here said they had served 3,100 cups since the search began.
Psychologists at the site periodically examined workers to determine how they are coping with the horror.
``It's important to let these guys know that whatever they feel is normal,'' said Dennis DiGiacomo, 25, a paramedic and counselor. ``They're all on autopilot now but when everything calms down it will hit them.''
(AP) The Rev. Carl Neely, a 30-year Army veteran who served in Vietnam, visited the workers at the morgue and the crash site.
``This is as close to combat as you'll find,'' Neely said.
President Clinton offered his sympathies in his radio address Saturday.
``All Americans will send their thoughts and prayers to the grieving this weekend,'' he said. ``Meanwhile, we're working to get to the bottom of what happened in the crash and we're working to continue to assure the safety of American passengers.''
The Associated Press and the New York Daily news contributed information to this story.
Keywords:
FATALITY
by CNB