Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (29 page)

When White saw Brown, she cried out, “There’s a priest here! I’m going to get him to give us a blessing.” White went away and returned with a priest, who dutifully proceeded to give each flight attendant a blessing, one at a time. But when he had gone, White cried out, “He didn’t give me one!”

Her mind kept returning to her tote bag and her car keys. She asked a rescue worker to escort her back to the tail. As she walked through the carnage, she saw Tim Owens being carried on a stretcher. White was “jumping up and down, I was so happy to see him.” In fact, she had assumed that he was dead, and Owens, having seen the tail break off and depart with White in it, had assumed the same of her. He was so excited to see her alive that he vaulted off the stretcher and ran to her.

“Yeah,” Owens said, reminiscing, “that was one of the biggest hugs that I’ve ever gotten or given anybody. I’ll never forget that. It was almost like one of those running-through-the-fields romance type of things.”

As Owens and White embraced each other, she saw Georgeann del Castillo too. But no one saw Rene Le Beau.

Owens returned to the stretcher and allowed the guardsmen to take him to an ambulance. Then White continued on to the tail and retrieved her bag. Feeling better about having her car keys, she came running back to the triage area, crying, “Donna! I found my bag! I found my bag!”

“Can you find mine?” McGrady asked.

“Sure!” White said, and off she went. Approaching the shattered tail, she saw McGrady’s purse on the ground, its contents spilled. A dead man lay nearby, legs and elbows cocked in an attitude of fleeing. She scooped everything into the bag and ran back to McGrady.

By then, White was in a frenzy of helping, charged with adrenaline. “I just couldn’t do enough,” she said. She was accosting paramedics saying, “Lemme do something, lemme do something,” and they’d send her to fetch supplies or anything to get her out of their hair. As she ran back and forth through the triage area, she had been unaware that the pile of debris nearby was the cockpit. But once Jim Allen’s team, along with Dave Kaplan and Ben Bendixen, had freed the crew, the pilots were laid out nearby. In one of her transits across the area, White saw Dvorak lying on a backboard. “I was so happy to see Dudley. He was all bloody.” She hurried over and trickled water on him and wiped his face. Kneeling beside him, she dripped water into his mouth. She watched the paramedics take him away and load him into an ambulance. Then she crossed the field to the Air National Guard headquarters building.

As she entered, she put her hands in her pockets and realized that she still had the paperwork for an unaccompanied minor in her apron. She drew it out and saw that it was for thirteen-year-old Cinnamon Martinez. When a parent puts a child on a commercial airliner alone, it is with the clear understanding that one specified member of the crew will be responsible for that child: If you get out, my child gets out. Yet when White had turned around from her jump seat, the plane was gone. She’d had no chance to look out for Cinnamon. White stumbled into the building in a welter of confused emotions and was greeted by flight attendants who had not been in the crash. They had been at the airport on a layover. When they saw the crash on the news, they crossed the airfield to help. They took Cinnamon’s paperwork from White. She went to a bank of phones to try to call her mother. All the lines were busy. Greg Clapper, who was passing by, stopped and introduced himself.

“I’m just trying to call my mom, and I can’t get a line.”

“You can come back in my office with me,” said Clapper. “I’ll help you call.”

“Oh, thank you so much.” White breathed a sigh of relief that she was the one being taken care of for once. “It was just so touching to me. I was so grateful.”

Clapper took her hand and led her back to his office, where they sat in chairs knee-to-knee. He continued to hold her hands. “Let’s pray,” he said. In telling me this, White broke down and cried, saying, “It always makes me cry.” She tried to call her mother again, but the line was busy. Her parents were divorced, so she was able to try her father at a different number. Although White did not yet know it, her father had had a premonition that she was on United Flight 232. He had called her mother, who tried to calm him, but he kept saying, “No, she was on there. I feel it, I feel it.” He had called United, but they refused to tell him anything, which convinced him that she was, indeed, on the flight.

“So by now the phone rings,” White said, “and my dad answers, and he has this deep ‘Hello.’ He had been crying, I could tell. And I said, ‘Daaad?’ ” White’s voice crept up into a high and trembling register.

“Susan!”

Four of White’s five sisters happened to be at her father’s house, and she could hear them scream in unison in the background. Her father was weeping over the phone, saying, “I knew you were on that plane.”

And White said in a quaking whisper, “
I’m alive!
”

Clapper was fixed on her, watching what appeared to him to be a genuine miracle. White started sobbing so hard then that she could no longer talk. She handed Clapper the phone. Ever since the engine exploded, she had tried not to break down. She had wanted to cry while attending the last moments of Cynthia Muncey’s life, even as she believed that she, too, would perish. She had held back her tears as she hugged Cindy and comforted her. But now at last, in the privacy of this office, in the company of the chaplain, and in contact with her family, she let go.

Jan Brown was still on the airfield when John Transue came by wearing nothing but his undershirt and slacks. Transue had been guarding a woman with a compound fracture of the leg. As passengers rushed away from the burning plane, some had accidentally stepped on her. When the woman complained that the sun was hurting her broken leg, Transue took off his shirt and covered her with it. Now as he was about to exchange a word of greeting with Jan Brown, he spotted his briefcase lying on the runway. He tried to make his way through the debris toward it, but a fire truck came roaring out of nowhere, smashed it flat, and went chugging off into the smoke. Transue picked it up anyway. He was wandering around on the airfield in his undershirt, carrying his crushed briefcase, when someone noticed that he was bleeding from the head and led him to an ambulance. He accepted an ice pack from a paramedic. Then stretcher bearers arrived with Captain Haynes and placed him in the ambulance. “He was face down,” Transue recalled. “He had towels on his head, because he was bleeding. He was
covered
in dirt. And he was weeping. He said, ‘I killed all those people, I killed all those people.’ And I said, ‘You didn’t kill anyone. You saved us.’ ” Then Dvorak arrived on another stretcher, and the paramedics slid him into the ambulance and rushed the two pilots to the hospital.

Transue was put on a crowded bus and driven toward the Air National Guard headquarters, where Clapper was helping Susan White call her father. As the bus moved slowly along the runway, Transue looked out the window and saw “torsos, arms, legs, all scattered along the runway. There were corpses and parts of corpses everywhere. I saw torsos with no arms, no legs.” A pretty woman in a blue dress went from corpse to corpse out there, peering into the faces of those who had faces. She clutched a small child in her arms.

“I started looking away then,” Transue said. “I didn’t want to look anymore.” But the images had been burned into his brain. Yet even among all the wreckage, both human and mechanical, a banjo lay on the runway, its leather shoulder strap still attached. It belonged to Pete Wernick, Dr. Banjo, who played bluegrass music in a band called Hot Rize. He was traveling with his wife Joan and their son Will and eleven large pieces of luggage, including that banjo and a steel guitar. He said he had some “pretty pricey possessions.” He had packed a laptop computer and a video camera, which were exotic and expensive gadgets at the time. Out of all that luggage, United Airlines returned only their still camera and the steel guitar. After a thorough restoration, “I still play that instrument on stage, scorch marks and all,” said Pete. The camera was “completely fried.” Pete soon replaced everything he had lost in the crash, including the computer and video camera. As a traveling musician, he flew regularly, and two weeks after the crash, he packed all his suitcases and instrument cases and checked his new luggage for a flight to a concert in Oregon. United Airlines lost his luggage for the second time. Of his newly acquired possessions, nothing was ever seen again.

In addition to playing with Hot Rize, Pete also sold instructional videos to teach people how to play the banjo. As it happened, the executive director of the Sioux City airport, Randy Curtis, was learning to play banjo using one of Pete’s videos when Dr. Banjo himself came crashing down out of the sky in an unscheduled fiery entrance. The day after the crash, Curtis walked out onto the runway and picked up the banjo. He found the case and put the banjo in it and shipped it back to Pete. He eventually wound up attending one of Pete’s banjo camps.

Ellen Ayers, thirty-two, worked in the cardiopulmonary unit at St. Luke’s as a neurodiagnostic technician. She was also qualified as a certified respiratory therapist. If you could not breathe, Ayers could breathe for you. She could make you live. She could put a tube down your throat and force air through it with a bag or a machine called a ventilator. Ayers was ready to go home at 3:30 on Wednesday afternoon when word came that a plane was in trouble and was headed her way. She called her husband Mark to say that she’d be late.

“I went to the ER, because I do the CPR.” She was prepared for major injuries, but what happened next was anticlimactic. “I recall a lot of just . . . hanging around, not knowing what to expect. There was a lot of excitement, because this is something that had never, ever happened before.” Ayers, however, had dealt with trauma in her previous job in Arizona. “I kind of felt calm.” She believed that she knew what to expect. So she checked and double-checked to make sure that the emergency room had all the necessary equipment for CPR, including endotracheal tubes and bags, “crash cart, suction, oxygen, and that those kind of things were in the room, and then it was just quiet and waiting.” The hospital staff, meanwhile, was dismissing all patients who weren’t in need of immediate attention and canceling all nonemergency surgery. The whole hospital fell silent except for the clicking and beeping of equipment and occasional announcements over the loudspeakers.

“And of course,” Ayers said, “the worst ones came in first.”

She thought she had seen enough trauma to be inured to it, but the first person to come into her care shocked and humbled her.
Gerald Harlon “Gerry” Dobson, forty-six
, from Pittsgrove Township, New Jersey, had suffered second- and third-degree burns over 93 percent of his body and had fractured his right tibia and fibula. Dobson, on his way home from a dream vacation in Hawaii, “was severely burned. We had intubated him, and I was bagging.”
His wife Joann and their companions
, Bill and Rose Marie Prato, were dead on the field, the muumuus and Hawaiian shirts singed and melted away. They suffered severe injuries to the head, neck, and chest.

In describing Dobson’s condition when he came through the emergency room, Ayers said, “There’s a lot of swelling. Just like if you burn your finger. It puffs up immediately, a lot of fluid underneath. His face, his arms, his legs, I mean, we’re talking, almost his total body was burned. If that was somebody that I knew, I would not recognize them.” Dobson’s heart was going like mad. The doctors stabilized him as well as they could. Ayers continued bagging. She ran alongside the gurney as the team pushed it down the hall and into the elevator, which took them to the burn unit. Ayers helped to put Dobson on the ventilator that would continue to breathe for him through the hours and then the days and the weeks to come.

“His lungs had gotten burned too,” Ayers said. The burned lung tissue swells, closing off airways and making recovery unlikely. He was eventually moved to Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Upland, Pennsylvania, across the Delaware River from New Jersey. His sons Arret, eighteen, and Emory, fourteen, rushed to his side.
Dobson couldn’t talk but was able to communicate
by squeezing their hands.

After Ayers had put Dobson on the ventilator, she returned to the emergency room. And then “it started to really get crazy. I mean, people were coming in left and right.” Doctors and nurses and technicians were rushing around pushing severely injured people on gurneys with ventilator bags going and IV bottles swinging, even as off-duty doctors, nurses, and technicians of every specialty arrived and tried to find some way to help. As Ayers made her way through this madness, dodging doctors and patients, she saw Kathy Shen, twenty-six, a flight attendant who had been deadheading in first class. She lay on a gurney with her stockings melted to her legs and a head wound. Ayers stood aside as she glided past. Shen was destined to remain in a coma for the next six weeks and to wake with no memory of United Flight 232 and none ever to return to her. She pieced together her own story by talking to many people over the years.
Shen would likely have been killed
if Jan Brown hadn’t moved her from her first class seat. When she asked Jan where to sit, Brown was busy and pointed to a seat and said, “There.” It happened to be the portside inboard jump seat, in which Shen was thrown clear of the plane. It was a random choice, but it saved her life.

“That was my fate,” Shen said. “My assigned seat was vanished.”

Ellen Ayers returned to the emergency room and began bagging patients who couldn’t breathe on their own. Then the off-duty respiratory technicians began to arrive. They had not seen much trauma, and this was new for them. They were so excited that they shoved in and took over from her. “It wasn’t rude. It was just excitement, wanting to be there and do something and help.” She could see that these wild-eyed, adrenaline-powered young technicians needed to feel that they were part of the action, so she busied herself bringing clean sheets and blankets and towels. “I kind of backed off on what my job truly was and started to do more of the menial little things.” By then the halls were jammed with people, and she felt as if she were in the way. In fact, nurses showed up from as far away as Minneapolis and Omaha.
Nurses and specialists who happened to be visiting
from San Francisco, Florida, and Colorado volunteered at either St. Luke’s or Marian Health Center. After a while, Ayers decided that it was time for her to go home to her husband.