Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (33 page)

On the field on that first day after the crash, Wizniak felt that he knew in his gut what he was looking at. He left his betters in Evendale and Washington, D.C., to scratch their heads while he put together his group and went out to look for the part of the airplane they would need to prove their case. His intuition and logic told him that the way this fan disk came apart, they were not going to find it anywhere near Sioux City. It was out by Storm Lake where the engine let go, about sixty miles away, near Alta, Iowa, where the farmers had heard the bang and had looked up to see pieces falling off of the airplane. They were going to need another kind of investigator to find the disk. John Clark, the senior performance engineer for the NTSB, would arrive later that afternoon.

In the meantime, Wizniak’s crew walked the field, “from the initial contact point to where it came to rest,” but they found nothing of interest where fan disk 00385 was concerned. Soon combines rolled onto the field and proceeded to cut down the soybeans that were growing along Runway 17-35 and 04-22. Then people began walking up and down swinging magnetometers in search of anything made of metal. They began turning up components from all over the aircraft. After all, more than a quarter of a million parts had spilled onto the field. (In fact, when I visited Sioux City in 2012, Colonel Dennis Swanstrom, by then retired, was still actively searching the cornfields for parts of 1819 Uniform.) The question in Wizniak’s mind, as in the minds of the other investigators, was, Which of those parts could help determine the cause of the crash?

The
searchers found three of the twenty nuts
that had held the fan disk to its driveshaft. The threads were stripped. Two additional nuts had been fired like bullets into the acoustic panels that surrounded the engine. Yet another nut was found—again, fired like a bullet from a gun—embedded in the right horizontal stabilizer, the area of the tail that Dvorak had seen from his position near Yisroel Brownstein and Richard Howard Sudlow. Behind the big front fan was the number two fan. Spherical imprints on the front of it showed where the number one bearing raceway was ripped open as the number one fan disk fractured. That bearing fired its balls like grapeshot, as the big disk tore the number two disk apart.

Searchers found the bent bolts that had been threaded through some of the nuts that had held the fan disk to the shaft, as well as fifteen pieces of fan blades, both on the ground and embedded in the tail. Farmers out near Storm Lake had begun to find various pieces even before the plane crashed. Wizniak and his team started the laborious process of documenting all the pieces of the number two engine. Although the engine had torn itself apart, many of its parts remained within the housing or lay on the ground nearby. Within a short time, a great variety of pieces had been brought in from the farmland around Alta, including pieces of the engine bellmouth, which would have killed someone if they had fallen in a slightly different location. Chuck Eddy, the sheriff of Buena Vista County, stood inside one piece. Significantly, two pieces of tubing from the number two hydraulic system were found in a farm field. With those in hand, Wizniak knew how at least one of the three hydraulic systems had failed. Each engine had two hydraulic pumps attached. Each pump ran off of the power from its respective engine. MacIntosh said that they knew that the hydraulic flex lines of the number two engine had been ripped loose in the explosion. Pieces of the pump accumulators were found near Alta. So they knew how the number two hydraulic system failed. “But we didn’t understand how we had lost number one and number three [hydraulic systems],” said MacIntosh. And although Wizniak thought he could guess how the other two hydraulic systems had failed, the NTSB wasn’t in the business of guessing. He would need help from experts in a wide range of disciplines—flight controls, metallurgy, ballistics, and other specialties—for the team to make his hunch convincing.

At about six o’clock on the evening of the crash
, well before sundown on that midsummer day, Dr. Gene Herbek, the acting Woodbury County medical examiner, had ridden out to the site in the back of an Air National Guard pickup truck with Marliss DeJong and other volunteers. On the ride, he turned to DeJong and said, “Don’t I know you?”

Herbek later said, “Initially we met before the crash at a bridge club, so that’s how I knew her.” He also knew her reputation for organization and paperwork, and now asked if she would help Brad Randall run the morgue.

Other than at a funeral, DeJong had never seen a dead body before, but she told Herbek, “I’ll do whatever you want.” What she saw while touring the site with Herbek convinced her that she could do the job. DeJong said, “One thing that I remember on the field was seeing an arm.” The woman’s arm was lying on the concrete, but it had “beautiful polished long red fingernails.” DeJong felt strong. She felt that she could handle what lay ahead.

Herbek said, “That’s one of the smart things I did that night, was appointing her to help us organize.”

That evening, back at Hangar 252, Herbek coordinated with Lawrence Harrington to prepare for the next day. They would have to document the dead on the field, then bag the bodies and move them to the refrigerated trucks. They would need to enlist volunteers to lift body bags and track bodies through the various stages in the morgue. At about eight o’clock that evening, Herbek picked up the phone and began to dial. He didn’t finish all of his calls until three o’clock in the morning.

Brad Randall, too, picked up a phone to try to reach the most prominent forensic dental team in America, headed by E. Steven Smith. Smith in turn contacted his colleagues Larry Pierce and Raymond D. Rawson in Las Vegas. Pierce and Rawson had worked identifying the eighty-five people who were killed in the fire at the MGM Grand Hotel in 1980.

DeJong worked on setting up a system for the paperwork involved in identifying the dead, while fielding calls that were routed to the office space in the modular home outside the hangar. Dentists and pathologists from all over the country volunteered their services. Late that night Randall reached the team at Northwestern University at last and then retired to Morningside College for a few hours of sleep.

At about two in the morning, Dr. Thomas Bennett, the state medical examiner, arrived. Herbek briefed him, and Bennett studied the flow chart that Randall and his team had prepared for the operation of the morgue. It took the dead step by step from where they lay on the airfield to the refrigerated trucks that had begun to arrive and on into the vestibule in the fuel cell hangar that would be created the next day using moveable partitions. There each body would proceed through the stations to be subjected to procedures for identification and autopsy to determine the cause of death. The body would then be embalmed and put into a casket. The caskets to be used would soon be trucked to Sioux City from Batesville, Indiana. Herbek went home to rest at three in the morning, while the Sioux City fire chief, Bob Hamilton, drove DeJong home.

Herbek, Randall, and DeJong were back in the hangar at 6:30 Thursday morning for a meeting with Bennett, the Red Cross, the Air National Guard, and the DCI to plan the day’s work. The first item to consider was how to map the position of the bodies that lay in this long and awkward swath of destruction. In early 1990, Randall presented a paper at the Forty-second Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Cincinnati. During that presentation, he said,

Conventional wisdom suggested
constructing a traditional grid system to locate the bodies. Although workable in a relatively small, compact crash site, the traditional grid was not applicable to a crash site which was over 1½ km long and several hundred metres wide. A former highway patrol officer suggested that we use instead a linear reference line and pinpoint each body by its distance from a reference and its perpendicular distance from the reference line.

An arbitrary reference point was established by someone from the DCI. Randall described it this way: “
First there was a reference point
, and then from that point a reference line was drawn. A body’s location was then plotted as the distance from the reference point along the reference line and then the distance above or below the line.”

Herbek recruited guardsmen to number body tags from one to one hundred, and he personally took control of those tags. “One of the things we also did was made sure there was only one set of body tags. [We] did not want to get duplicates of numbers,” Herbek said. “We had numbers one through one hundred made up that morning.” Then an investigator from the DCI used a rolling measuring wheel to determine the distance from the reference line to each body. Thus would the dead be fixed in space and a scatterplot diagram be made of them, with each body represented by a red dot and a tag number.

Hangar 252 was not yet a morgue, and much remained to be done, as
the guardsmen, squatting on the painted concrete floor
with the orange demarcation lines on its perimeter, carried out their tasks. They were quiet as they passed lengths of wire through the holes in the tags. Any noise echoed sharply in the vast space with its white-painted cinderblock walls, pipes and girders running across them in every direction. In a room of such deliberate blandness, where the fuel tanks for fighter planes were serviced, the yellow emergency shower, placed there for someone who might accidentally splash himself with fuel or chemicals, suggested the urgent purpose of the building.

While the guardsmen prepared tags, DeJong had white boards brought in and set up on the steel racks that were used to store spare aircraft tires. Someone used a wooden yardstick and felt-tipped marker to rule horizontal and vertical lines on the white boards, forming cells for information concerning the dead. Each row would bear a number from one of the tags to represent a dead person in search of an identity. Then, reading across from left to right, the display would show each step in the process of identification, starting with the tag number, then body X-ray, dental X-ray, fingerprints, and so on, through personal effects and unusual characteristics such as scars or tattoos.
*
Near the far right of each line was a space labeled “Possible ID” for the person’s name. Once the white boards had been prepared to receive this information, they were installed on the walls of the office in the modular home north of Hangar 252, to provide a quick reference that anyone could read at a glance.

United Airlines helped to establish communication lines and a phone number that the relatives of victims could call. Volunteers called all of the families of those who were thought to have died in the crash. The families were told to bring dental X-rays to any airport, turn them over to any airline, and United would see that they reached Hangar 252 as fast as possible. FedEx set up a special account to handle those deliveries at no charge.

Herbek and his teams, including the DCI, returned to the field at about 8:30 in the morning and set about establishing the linear reference system, a process that took about two hours of working around the dead out in the sun. The morning had risen cool and clear. A light wind from the northwest still blew papers and the few remaining hundred-dollar bills around. As the teams worked, many other groups were toiling as well. Laura Levy set up her laser transit and began mapping the field of debris. Edward Wizniak and his group expressed astonishment at the condition of engine number 451-243. MacIntosh and Benzon surveyed the field to ascertain where “the four corners” of the aircraft had come to rest: the wingtips, the nose, and the tail.

Randall created three teams for the initial phase of recovering bodies. Each team was headed by a pathologist. Randall assigned one team to each of three areas where the majority of the bodies lay. “While there were three areas in this part of the body recovery,” Randall told me, “the fourth area contained the bodies still in the burned-out portion of the plane.” Lieutenant Jim Walker, the Air National Guard pilot who had been among the first to respond to the crash—who had watched in disbelief as the dead rose up out of their seats and walked—was assigned to that fourth team.

Working from the flow chart, DeJong directed workers to set up a maze of blue canvas partitions in the hangar to isolate areas for full body X-rays, for dental X-rays, for conducting autopsies, and so on. She ordered office supplies, surgical gloves, and disposable aprons, among other necessities. She arranged the flow of paperwork in the office and coordinated with Harrington, who provided secretaries from the Air National Guard to type and file. DeJong sought out help from the Red Cross and Salvation Army in setting up food trucks and tents outside, where the workers could eat and take breaks. The menu would include chili, sloppy joes, chips, and pop.

In the meantime,
Gary Brown began to realize
that despite their constant planning and training, they had overlooked some of the details. “Some of the things we really, really weren’t prepared for were some of the things that were needed in the morgue—sawhorses, working tables. We had anticipated embalming tables, autopsy tables, but we really didn’t anticipate workbenches and worktables and that they were going to need room dividers, that they would want to section off this morgue, so it wouldn’t be quite as gruesome to everyone working in there. The more traumatic parts of it could be screened off.”

Randall explained that if an accident such as this
, or any mass casualty, happened today, the authorities would contact the National Disaster Medical System of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Once that organization is notified, it assembles a Go Team, known as a Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (DMORT), composed of volunteers who are specialists in the fields of temporary morgue facilities, victim identification, forensic dental pathology, forensic anthropology methods, as well as the processing, preparation, and disposition of human remains. The DMORT would also include medical records technicians and transcribers, fingerprint experts, X-ray technicians, funeral directors, mental health specialists, computer experts, administrative support staff, and security and investigative personnel. The DMORT would come with its own “morgue in a box,” known as Disaster Portable Morgue Units. These so-called DPMUs are always ready to be dispatched from warehouses on the East Coast and the West Coast. The DPMU contains all the equipment and supplies needed for the DMORT to create a complete morgue, with all its workstations for each step in processing a body, including all of the equipment and supplies that DeJong and Harrington had to assemble piecemeal from wherever they could find them. Under the DMORT system, no one would have to go looking for anything. Brad Randall credits Marliss DeJong with creating the tracking system that is still in use by DMORT to ensure that no body is misidentified. Others say that Randall is too modest and deserves some of the credit. Either way, it is clear that the crash of United Flight 232 and the people of Siouxland had a lasting influence on the way we respond to disasters.