Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (21 page)

In the immediate aftermath of the crash, Mark Reinders, carrying no more equipment than a notebook, found himself stymied by the dozens of vehicles blocking the main gate to the airfield. He took back roads, which he knew well, and parked near the north end of the airport. “I assume the statute of limitations has run out,” Reinders admitted to me a bit sheepishly. “But I literally climbed the fence.” Coming from the north, Reinders first reached an area that a number of the passengers later called the Grassy Knoll. The rise in the land where no corn grew made a home for a few gnarled and aging scrub trees, some weeds and grasses, a boulder, and the running killdeer and creaking red-winged blackbirds. A gravel road curved into the distance. A vast cornfield separated the knoll from the wreckage, but many of the passengers, running through the corn, were led there by the arrangement of the rows. As Reinders approached, he saw a few people sitting on and near the boulder and called out, “Hey, what are you guys up to? Are you with the airport?”

“No,” one of them said. “We were in that plane that crashed.”

Reinders was “speechless and dumbfounded.” An FAA technician had already discovered the passengers and radioed for help. Soon Air National Guard men and women escorted the survivors to triage. The rescue workers wanted to take Reinders to triage too, but he told them that he was not a survivor, he was a reporter. They told him to go away, “and there was no way I was going away.”

Fortunately, the Guard members had their hands full, and Reinders slipped into the cornfield. He bashed his way through the stalks as survivors hurried past in the other direction. The heat was steaming him inside his clothing as he slogged through the rows, while a helicopter thundered overhead. He ducked down to avoid being seen. After the helicopter passed, he pushed on toward the wreckage. “And your adrenaline is just pounding the whole time,” he recalled.

Emerging from the rows of corn, he concealed himself in the spaces among the emergency vehicles, which were parked haphazardly in every direction. From that vantage, he said, “I just took it all in.” By then the police had rounded up all the other reporters and photographers and ejected them from the scene. Reinders was the only official witness left. All except for Shari Zenor, the young intern, who was concealed within Orville Thiele’s fire department SUV. Although she had a box seat for the biggest show ever to hit Siouxland, the fire fighters had told her to stay in the vehicle, and she obeyed them. Marcia Poole later wrote, “
It’s doubtful, however
, that any of the experienced reporters or photographers would have obeyed orders to stay in the fire department vehicle. The extreme circumstances would have compelled them to get out of the truck and go to work.”

Zenor, however, was in shock
, and she remained in shock throughout the afternoon, trapped in the vehicle, taking desultory notes as the scanner emitted bursts of static and frenzied voices. People were trapped in the fuselage as Larry Niehus, Jerry Logemann, and the other fire fighters tried to put out the fire with foam. Zenor could taste the oily smoke and hear the sirens and helicopters and the roar of the angry fire. She took in the dead bodies in their seats, even as survivors streamed out of the murk toward her. One of those survivors, a man wearing a blue Oxford shirt and a tie, came to her window and asked for water. Zenor opened the door and stepped out of the car to point the man in the direction of the triage area. For many years, Zenor would see that man’s face in her dreams.

Thiele had his driver move the vehicle several times in the first hour after the crash. By that time, the injured were gone. Thiele asked Zenor if she wanted to get out and look around. She stepped down into the wintry scene and tried on the unfamiliar cloak of the reporter. “I saw bodies and body parts,” she later wrote. “We had to drive around and through them. Most hadn’t been covered. Some of them were still in their seats. I can shut my eyes and see those people.”

Mark Reinders was in shock as well. When I asked him to tell me what he saw out there, all the air went out of him in a loud rushing hiss. He was rendered speechless for a moment, as the memories rushed back in. He described it as “similar to a tornado, where you just see so many personal items, purses and books and clothing and blankets and everything else just strewn out over the runway—wallets, napkins, necklaces, credit cards, and things like that, just—forever. And the wind was blowing and a lot of that stuff was blowing across the runway in the grassy areas.” He surveyed the scene, scrawling in his notebook, “Two sets of golf clubs, a wallet photo insert depicting a pretty brunette in her prom dress, a Reebok tennis shoe, a purple hairdryer, pages and pages ripped from magazines, a dozen pieces of luggage, a signed graduation card, one woman’s black high heeled shoe and a collection of Marilyn Monroe photos.”

While he crept among the emergency vehicles, catching glimpses of the scene from his concealment, Reinders was struck by the endless computer tape that draped the site, as if it were a festive bunting for this unclean event. In the dim and smoky atmosphere, “it was like tinsel at Christmas with people dead in their seats,” he later said. Pat McCann, a young police officer who was on the field, said it made him think of some sort of diabolical parade.

Reinders wrote in his notebook that the heat of the fire had withered the cornstalks and seared off their tops in a vast swath to the south of the main wreckage. He mentioned the strong smell of kerosene. He noted that even when the bodies were covered, it was obvious that some had been torn apart. The advantage the reporter has over the photographer is that his equipment is in his head. He need only open his eyes and see. And by now Reinders had seen it all. Moreover, all the survivors had been taken away by then. So he took in the blackness where a wall of flame had passed over the runway and the grass. He let the overwhelming heat and toxic smells of burning jet fuel and plastic and of the people who had not made it out of the fuselage seep into him and find a permanent place there, and he filed those things away where he could retrieve them later on.

When the time came at last, as Reinders knew it would, the police escorted him off the field. He returned to the newsroom and found “a chaotic mess” because everyone was trying to make the deadline for the next day’s paper. Reinders wasn’t even sure that he had anything to contribute because he hadn’t really interviewed anyone in an official capacity. But Reinders had something more valuable than mere facts or quotes. He had a human view of the scene, and Cal Olson recognized that and told him to write it. “And that is what I did.” Reinders served the role of official witness to a great historic event.

Everyone at the
Journal
scrambled to develop film and print photos. They pounded out copy and even managed to answer the ringing phones and make room in their darkroom for photographers from other news organizations. The bulldog edition of the paper went to bed at ten that night. Then Mark Fageol transmitted photos electronically to various news organizations for a few hours. He packed up a couple of hundred prints and set out for the airport in Omaha at about two in the morning. Some news organizations, such as
Time
and
Newsweek
, required prints for the higher-quality images they offered. It fell to Fageol to get them to the Associated Press in New York as fast as possible so that organization could distribute them to the magazines and other outlets. He reached the airport in Omaha at about three o’clock. At first the only plane he could find bound for New York was a United flight. He hesitated. Fageol understood that if he shipped a box of photos from the
Sioux City Journal
to the Associated Press, it might never arrive. “It would be one of those lost luggage things,” he said with a laugh. He found another flight later that morning, made sure the package was on board, and began the return trip home. “By the time I got halfway to Sioux City, it’s sunrise.”

Even before Fageol began his drive to Omaha, many of the reporters had gone to Miles Inn, the local hangout for journalists, and ordered drinks. The team from KTIV, the local television station that had been co-founded by the
Journal
, was in attendance as well. The pub was small and crowded. As the
Journal
staffers drank and watched the coverage on television, the footage of the crash came flaming across the screen above the bar in horrifying color. Dave Boxum from KTIV had stood right behind Gary Brown, with the airport fence between them, and had caught the fiery breakup.
*

“And it was kind of unfortunate,” Reinders said of that night, “because . . . [the KTIV team] kind of cheered. They were proud of what they had caught on camera. But there were some other people in the tavern who found that offensive. There wasn’t a big row, but it was kind of like, You heartless bastards, people died in that plane crash.” Yet it was understandable that they wanted to acknowledge their achievement. They had caught on video what was never caught on video at that time: the crash of an airliner full of people.

In fact, all of the reporters at Miles Inn that night had helped to document a unique event in history. As Reinders said of the ensuing days and weeks of round-the-clock work, “It was fun. It was invigorating. Long, long hours, because it was taking so much space and time, and nobody cared. Because that’s what we do in the newspaper world. I remember being very proud of the next day’s coverage. We were heartbroken for all the people that lost their lives and proud of the people that were on the scene and helped out, but we did our role as well, and to me there’s nothing wrong with that.” In the aftermath, Reinders worried that he might really be a heartless bastard. But when Cal Olson sent him to cover the one-year anniversary of the crash, he said, “I cried like a baby.”

Just before the crash, a volunteer
with WCDES, a local businessman named Dave Kaplan, was flying one of his company’s airplanes inbound to Sioux City. “I was actually airborne at the time and witnessed the smoke plume from far away,” Kaplan recalled. Since the airport was closed right after the crash, he landed at another field and caught a ride back to Sioux City. “I reported to Gary [Brown] when I got there and he sent me to a pile of wreckage to check it out.” As he approached the pile, he saw fire fighters standing around examining passengers and asked, concerning the unrecognizable pile of debris, “What’s this?”

A voice came out of the pile: “It’s the cockpit. There’s four of us in here.”

Years later, Kaplan recalled, “It scared the be-Jesus out of me when I heard voices calling for help out of that pile.”

Jim Allen, a lieutenant with Engine 5
of the Sioux City Fire Department, and two of his fire fighters gathered around with Kaplan and started talking with the eerie voices emanating from within the tangled mess. Allen, wearing a neat mustache and cleanly trimmed brown hair flecked with gray, gave a sad smile as he ruminated on the difficulties his crew faced that day. The flight crew, he said, was “
trapped in this wreckage
that to the naked eye did not resemble a cockpit area whatsoever.” They were used to people being trapped in cars or trucks, which presented known “points of access,” as he put it. “There was nothing to go by. We winged it.” It seemed to be nothing but a giant ball of wire. Indeed, the amount of wire in a DC-10 could stretch from Sioux City to Omaha and beyond, and it all came together in the cockpit, the location from which the plane was supposed to be controlled. As the plane rotated up onto its nose and as the cockpit was sheared away from the first class cabin, those wires were pulled from the walls and floor of the aircraft and were left trailing. Then as the cockpit tumbled down the runway at better than a hundred miles an hour, it wrapped itself in those wires.

Allen and his crew used hacksaws to cut the wire. Once the fire fighters had unwrapped the cockpit from its shroud, they were able to reach in through the broken windows and cut the pilots’ seat belts. Chaplain Clapper knelt beside the wreckage, his hand thrust inside to touch Bill Records’s head. A paramedic reached through a broken window to give Records oxygen. “I was on the bottom of the pile, and it kind of revived me,” Records said. The rescue workers tried to lift the wreckage but it wouldn’t budge. Allen radioed to one of the WCDES vehicles that carried AMKUS tools, powerful hydraulic clippers used for cutting the tops off of wrecked cars. But when they tried to use those cutters on Records’s side of the pile, it began squeezing Haynes, and he screamed in pain. When they tried it on Haynes’s side, Records called out.

“We stopped that immediately,” said Allen, “and I called for a forklift.” He thought that if they could lift the structure straight up with no side loads on it, they might succeed.

At about that time, one of the Air National Guard pilots saw Bendixen across the 150-foot-wide runway and asked for his help. Bendixen marched across the runway and began to look for ways to give assistance. He peered inside and saw living, breathing men.

“I was face-to-face with this flight surgeon,” Dvorak recalled. “He was peeking into the crack and talking to me.”

The Air National Guard sent Allen both a crane and a large forklift. As Bendixen inspected the wreckage to see where each person was located and to assess his condition, Allen chose the forklift. He had the operator put the forks above the cockpit. “We strung a chain around the forks and down throughout various trusses of the wreckage,” said Allen. One man was assigned to each pilot to watch him and to alert the operator to stop lifting if the movement was crushing anyone. Then Allen ordered the forklift operator to lift the wreckage six inches. A guardsman stood on the forks looking down to ensure that the pile of debris came straight up. The pile rose a few inches off the ground. Bendixen and Allen checked with each monitor. It appeared that no one inside was being injured, so Allen gave the order to resume lifting, and Fitch came out, as Allen put it, “almost immediately, almost under his own power.”

“We didn’t hear any noise from him anymore,” Dvorak said.