A fire that will stick in my mind forever is when PSA Flight 182 went down. It was an airliner that collided with a small single engine private plane. The small plane damaged the controls of the airliner when they hit, and they both went down in a populated commercial area with apartments. When it came down, it hit at such an angle that the nose of the aircraft was buried about ten feet down into the ground. Most of the wreckage was not thrown very far, except that all of the people in the aircraft were cut in half by the seatbelts. Half-bodies were laying next to the curb on one side of the street. 

Naturally, there were no survivors, so it was our job to go in there and pick up body parts and try to match them up. What we had to do was put one half of a body into a body bag and leave it open until we found what we thought was the other half. Then we would place the other half in the body bag, and once we figured that we had a whole body we would zip it up. I was there doing that for about eight hours. At one time, I climbed down off of a garage roof with somebody’s hand in my pocket and their arm and hand in my own hand. That was a gruesome scene. There was also a body that was shot out of the airplane and flew for about three quarters of a block before passing through the windshield of a car, and we had to dig it out. Another body was ejected with such force that it went through an exterior stucco wall, so we had to go and clean all that up. I think that happened in about 1978-79, and at that time it was the worst aircraft accident that had ever happened in the United States. 

An interesting thing about this is the impact that it had on the police and fire departments. It was our job as firefighters to go in there and pick up body parts, and it was the police department’s job to watch the perimeter to keep civilians out of the crash area, and to protect the scene from thieves. And there were thieves. There were people trying to steal from the luggage that was thrown all over. Several days after the crash, psychiatrists and officials came in and talked with all of the first responders. They found that the police were having more trouble coming to terms with the gruesome sights and the things going on than the firefighters, even though the firefighters were the ones actually picking up the bodies. Keep in mind that in those days, we didn’t wear rubber gloves or masks. All we had was our leather work gloves, so our turnouts and gloves were saturated with body fluids and gore. It was really a gross, stinky job. What made the difference was that after the incident was over the police officers had to go back into their cars and ride around by themselves and think about what they had seen and done, whereas the firefighters went back to their stations as a team and discussed it all. So the firefighters weren’t as affected psychologically as the police department was. That was an interesting outcome of that incident. I think the city and firefighters and police department all learned something from that.