31-01-2025
"Crash, crash, crash": How D.C.'s first and last responders are recovering the dead
The conditions are unthinkable — a mass casualty site on the frigid Potomac. The complexity of the operation, numbing.
After America's deadliest airline crash in a generation, disaster crews turned to the painstaking tasks ahead: recovering every body, identifying each life lost, reuniting the dead with those they leave behind.
The big picture: Emergency responders deployed overnight Wednesday, plumbing the watery grave left by the collision between American Airlines flight #5342 and one of the Army's Black Hawk helicopters.
Zoom in: Divers worked in 20-minute shifts around the wreckage, swimming through the pitch-black depths and taking breaks at times to replace their suits, torn by debris.
An ice-breaking D.C. fire boat couldn't be called in because it was out of service.
Jet fuel clouded the river.
Twisted pieces of aircraft snarled the path to some victims.
The water was 36 degrees.
They train for this. And yet.
"They normally get calls for aircraft in distress. This time it rang, and all they heard was crash, crash, crash," said David Hoagland, head of the Fire and EMS union.
As families of the victims were invited to a support center, counselors were deployedto help the disaster crews themselves.
By Thursday morning, currents were pushing debris as far south as the Woodrow Wilson Memorial Bridge.
National Harbor and other neighborhoods temporarily closed the public access to their waterfronts. Search vessels combed the shoreline and surface.
The expectation being that remnants of the crash will wash ashore.
From the water, boats moved the victims to D.C.'s Southwest waterfront, the transfer of remains from the first responders to the last responders.
Red tents popped up near Audi Field, a makeshift morgue.
The last acts of caretaking for the dead began.
By Thursday evening, they had found 28 people. On the flight were young figure skaters with Olympic dreams, five members of a steamfitters union from Annapolis, a pilot who was engaged to be married.
Divers will return today to continue the recovery mission and begin extracting the aircraft from the water, D.C. Fire & EMS told Axios.
Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board will be on the scene, said NTSB member Todd Inman, "for as long as it takes."
