SERIAL FICTION

The Unfolding Of A Gruesome Scene

Shadows Of Mayday #15: Recovering the victims #1: Emergency teams arrived and the salvaging of victims started

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Sounds of sirens filled the air as the emergency vehicles drew closer to the wreckage of the crashed plane. Only the flashing of the blue and red lights remained as the noise stopped.

People spilled from the insides of the vehicles and started their emergency procedures. Their priority was to look for survivors, but before they could do that, the fire teams had to extinguish the fires. They soon dampened the smoldering and safeguarded the remaining kerosene in the fuel tanks.

Once the firefighters had done their part, the teams of emergency workers moved in.

In five teams, they worked the crash site — two teams from the back of the plane, one on each side and two teams from the front, also one on each side. A fifth team checked for safety before they entered the front and the back parts of the plane.

The part of the aircraft behind the wings had broken into pieces. The tailpiece was intact, as was the cockpit, the business class area and part of the economic class.

Each member of the teams wore a hard hat, with a light on it to illuminate their own way. It was pitch-dark out in the desert and the coastal road had no lights. Neither were there any lights on inside the plane.

On their first scan, the emergency people found no survivors. A more intense search started as soon as more emergency workers arrived.

The emergency teams checked each body for vital signs. They were quiet as they moved along and listened for sounds, but all they heard was the gentle lapping of the waves on the beach.

Poignant scenes unfolded in front of them: a mother still holding her son’s hand, a man with his arms in a protective embrace around the woman next to him; two women holding hands, facing each other and hanging in their seats; a man with his arms in front of his face as if to hide the horrific scene around him.

These people almost seemed like they had frozen in their positions with the plane’s impact.

Not all bodies were intact. Some missed a leg or an arm. Or more. There was blood everywhere, but some victims had no blood at all on them.

In the meantime, while the emergency teams worked, the response team leader — Captain Clarke — contacted the airports in Amsterdam and Johannesburg. He confirmed that Flight LU-365 had crashed between Swakopmund and Walvis Bay with 303 people on board.

It was unclear why the aircraft crashed at this location, because the flying route didn’t come close to this area. The direction from where the plane seemed to have crashed was also wrong. It flew in from the Atlantic Ocean, but the flight path should not have taken it over the ocean or Namibia.

Captain Clarke listened as the air traffic control officer in Windhoek informed him of further actions.

“A team of investigators will board a plane in Amsterdam tonight. They will arrive in Windhoek tomorrow morning. From there, they will fly on to Walvis Bay and arrive at the crash site by the end of the day tomorrow. Another team of investigators will fly in from Johannesburg,” the voice on the phone told the team leader.

Before he could ask anything, the voice continued: “To get a quick start to the crash investigation, a preliminary team from Windhoek is already on their way to Walvis Bay.”

Captain Clarke received specific instructions to make snapshots of everything they saw, including the victims. The emergency teams could move the deceased from the scene only after they had taken a first series of images.

When they found no survivors, the emergency teams reported back to the team leader, who gave them instructions on their next actions.

“I want you to divide into four teams. Each team will work a quarter of the crash site. Take photos, people, take photos! Make sure you take enough photos before you move anything. Even more so since it’s dark.”

They required photos to give a full report of exactly where each body had been found in relation to pieces of the wreck.

“You are better off taking too many photos than not enough,” Captain Clarke emphasized, “Tag each body with the number of the section you’re working.”

He appointed four team captains, and each member of the teams received a notebook to record everything they saw, smelled, or thought was necessary to bring to the attention of the air crash investigators.

Everyone knew they wouldn’t sleep much for several days, and definitely not at all in the coming hours. A lot of work needed to be done in the next couple of days, with the primary goal of getting the deceased back to their loved ones for burial.

This, however, couldn’t happen until medical professionals had examined the victims.

As the teams got back to work, Captain Clarke called different undertakers in Swakopmund and Walvis Bay and asked them to send their hearses out to the crash scene.

“Please keep the news about the plane crash quiet. We want to keep curious onlookers and reporters away from the scene as long as possible,” he told the different undertakers.

Not one undertaker refused to drive to the crash site. They would have to drive on and off to get all the victims to the two towns. There was nothing else the chief could do other than supervising the progress of recovering the victims of the crash.

The teams lay the corpses in rows several meters away from the plane and away from the debris of the crash. Their work was strenuous because of the dark. They only had the lights on their hard hats to light their ways.

Complicating the work even more was the sad sight of seeing the dead bodies next to each other, with nothing to cover them. There were not enough white sheets or body bags available. They had to wait for the hearses to arrive.

Continued: Shadows Of Mayday #16

Find all chapters here.

This story is a work of fiction, and the author’s tribute to all victims of air crashes. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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