Mayday Over Wichita (5 page)

Then a vision came to me and said, “You've got a few more seconds,” then I saw the clothes hamper in the bathroom and I got up and rammed it through the bathroom window, and I followed immediately out the window
.
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Cut severely by shards of glass as he leapt out the window naked, Clarence landed in a puddle of flaming jet fuel while his wife escaped on the other side of the house through the blown-out back door. Their entire backyard “was boiling in fire,” and the engulfed home collapsed seconds later as they desperately ran from the sea of flames.
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Twenty-two-year-old James Glover, asleep in the front bedroom, never made it out. “He was completely demolished,” said Clarence. “I don't think he had ever got up considering the way they say they brought him out.”
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His remains were later found, still in his bed.

Robert Jackson, only twelve years old at the time, was walking to the grocery store just before the plane hit. Attempting to outrun the tanker bearing down on him, he quickly found himself rolling in the dirt to smother the flames that were melting his thin jacket onto his skin.
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“I ran and ran and ran,” said Robert, “and the plane came lower and lower and the engine got louder and louder.” Hospital officials at St. Francis stated, “But for the synthetic fiber jacket, he would have received severe burns on his back.”
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Robert, although in the vicinity of the plane when it fell, had miraculously survived the crash. He was the exception.

The merciless hellfire scorched everything in its path—houses, cars, trees, front lawns, pets and human beings. No one was safe, and no one in the immediate area of the gushing jet fuel was spared. It was, as one reporter noted, “like a small Hiroshima,” with carnage, fire and smoke everywhere you looked.
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The impact of the crash imploded windows in homes, allowing the flaming jet fuel to creep inside and burn the occupants to death. “We could hear our neighbors screaming,” a survivor said. “[M]ost of them were still asleep or just eating breakfast.”
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A horrid lake of fire raged on as awful moans of agony shot out from those trapped inside the blue and orange flames. “No one tried to save any of the trapped,” claimed a reporter first arriving on scene. “It was too late. Most of the homes had been flattened and all were burning.”
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The small number that attempted rescues, such as the Reverend J. E. Mason, encountered ghastly sights. Mason ran through the thick smoke on Piatt Street trying to hustle disoriented neighbors out of the area. “I went into one house,” he told reporters, “and saw a 5-year-old boy burn to death with his hands up in the air. There was nothing I could do at that house.” As people were “crying and struggling to get into the burning houses for their relatives,” Mason grabbed several hysterical victims and kept them from the futility and probable self-demise of entering the ferocious blaze.
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Entire families were swallowed up by the inferno (the Daniels, the Warmsleys, the Boldens, the Maloys), children were burned alive in their beds and others were incinerated trying to escape in their cars. The screams of men like Joe Martin, who lived at 2031 North Piatt, could be heard among the panic and chaos: “My boys in there! My boys in there!…Oh, my Lord, oh my Lord, both my boys burned up.”
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Joe was seen staggering about the neighborhood in a daze wearing only an unbuttoned shirt—the loss of his sons too great to comprehend.
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Ellison W. Brown, an airman stationed at McConnell, was later found sobbing amidst the wreckage of what was once his friend Albert Bolden's home. Albert was to have been Ellison's best man at his wedding. The charred ruins and fumes of smoke were all that remained. Albert and Wilma Bolden, along with their nine-month-old daughter, Leslie, all perished inside.
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Some, too, would never forget the morbid sight of children on fire in their front yards like “stick[s] of wood.”
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The most accurate description came from a reporter a month later, who described the area of impact as looking like a “[t]ornado pushing fire ahead of it had passed through.”
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Destruction of this kind had never been seen before in Kansas.

For Sonya House—not yet thirty years old—who saw the plane crash sixty-seven feet away in front of her living room window, the sight was indescribable, too awful for words. Sonya recalled, “I didn't know what happened…It was burning like hell, and that's what I thought it was. That's all I could see was fire.”
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Her father, Robert, was violently thrown against the doorframe by the explosion as he desperately raced inside to help gather his family. Fortunately for some, the fire was so concentrated in the area of 20
^th
and Piatt that it either killed the residents instantly or left them unharmed.

Piatt Street engulfed in flames.
Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum
.

As Sonya rushed out onto her front porch, she saw what looked like a warzone. “The fire was everywhere, and it was rolling down the street. It looked to me like everything in the world was on fire,” she recalled.
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A wall of flames the size of a city block burned hundreds of feet high as frantic residents scattered in all directions. “It was burning up the grass under our feet as we ran,” survivors remembered.
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A lake of fire was all around. Some witnesses, like Bill Friesen, a civil defense director at the time, described the scene as “rivers of fire…running from curb to curb,” with flames gushing like a “volcano” and “running down [gutters] to 13
^th
Street.”
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Fourteen homes were burning in a three-block radius, and sixty-eight others were riddled with damage. Thirty automobiles and countless personal possessions—everything that a person would acquire in life—were now gone.
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The greatest loss, however, was that of human life. Nearly half of those killed on the ground were children under the age of twelve. Hundreds of onlookers stood “motionless, their eyes fastened on the blazing wreckage of homes,” while others sobbed, gazing in shock.
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As the piercing sirens of fire trucks and police cars drew closer, the horrors—concealed just beyond the thick, black smoke—would soon be discovered by those heading into the tempest of flames.

5

GOING INTO HELL

…
[I]
t should have been titled “Twenty-five Minutes of Hell for Wichita Firefighters” because, gentlemen, that is exactly what it was
.

—Tom McGaughey, Wichita Fire Chief, 1965
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For rescue workers entering the fray, the horrors came in three: the smell, a pungently noxious stench of burning flesh and debris mixed with jet fuel; the sound, piercing sirens and a crescendo of agonizing screams and cries for help within the flames; and, most dreadful, the sight, the charred bodies of human remains, the fire-engulfed homes and the weary, tearful faces of helpless onlookers. The Piatt Street crash tortured the senses, as well as the memories, of all who encountered its fury.

The video footage captured by
KAKE News
shortly after the fire contained vivid scenes of panic and bewilderment. Ghostly images of firemen, their faces smeared with black soot and fatigue, emerged from smoldering wreckage carrying out lifeless bodies. Cars were burned down to their frames, leaving nothing but seething shells. Pools of thick, green jet fuel were scattered here and there. Flame-gutted houses were rubble and ash. Stiff corpses—still smoking and simmering from the intense heat—lay beneath blankets in an open field, marked only by makeshift cardboard tags with the house number from which they were recovered. Victims staggered like disembodied zombies, their hands stretched out in front of them, feeling their way through the dense smoke and tripping over debris, airplane parts and bodies as they went. Just a few steps from the impact point, a tattered officer's garrison cap with lieutenant bars—a gruesome reminder of the airmen—was found beneath the scorched remains of a tree.
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For those directly touched by the disaster, it was as close to hell as one could come on earth.

Rescue workers search the remains of a home, looking for victims.
22
^nd
ARW History Office
.

Firefighters search through burning wreckage for victims.
Larry Hatteberg
, KAKE TV.

C
HIEF
M
C
G
AUGHEY

Wichita Fire Chief Tom McGaughey.
Kansas Firefighters' Museum
.

Fire Chief Tom McGaughey joined the WFD in 1933 and became its chief in 1960. He was described by those who knew him as a “fireman's fireman,” “first-rate,” a man who not only led but also led by example.
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He pushed for pay increases for firemen, encouraged his men to pursue their educations and meticulously studied firefighting techniques to better train firemen and save lives. A hardworking man like his father, he labored on railroads during the Great Depression for one dollar a day and was a part of the “Greatest Generation”—which persevered through drought, deprivation, crime and war. He suffered serious burns to his shoulders and back in 1936, when the roof at McClellan's Store on East Douglass Street collapsed on him during a fire. He nearly drowned trying to save a victim at the bottom of Santé Fe Lake, east of Wichita, in 1937. By 1965, when he was well into his fifties, he was still charging into fires alongside the rookies; he was the first in and the last out.
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He had iron in his soul; his men adored him, and there was no question that he was in charge.

But Chief McGaughey's greatest test was about to begin that Saturday morning. Unaware of the chaos the day would bring, he had intended to play golf with his friend, Deputy Fire Chief Bob Simpson. Realizing it was much too cold out, Chief McGaughey canceled his plans, choosing to stay home instead.
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The relaxing Saturday he envisioned never came. Speaking to a large audience at a Fire Department Instructors' conference in Memphis, Tennessee, sometime after the crash, Chief McGaughey entitled his speech “Fire from the Sky Over Wichita,” but as he quickly explained to his audience, “Perhaps it should have been titled ‘Twenty-five Minutes of Hell for Wichita Firefighters' because, gentlemen, that is exactly what it was.”
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