After Asiana jet crash, a dramatic race to rescue passengers

— It began like any other Saturday, until the 11:27 a.m. call came in.

For the fire crews who staff the “crash house” at San Francisco International Airport, emergencies usually entail a malfunctioning plane light or a minor problem with a wing flap. But when Lt. Christine Emmons heard the tone of the dispatcher’s voice — “Alert 3, alert 3, plane crash, plane crash” — she knew this one was different.

“The event we were going to was real,” said Emmons, one of several first responders who were close to tears Monday as they shared tales of their race to save passengers and crew from the burning wreckage of Asiana Airlines Flight 214.

As the drama unfolded, firefighters ran up one of the aircraft’s inflated escape chutes to get to those trapped inside. A police officer without protective gear joined them, entering through the breached tail section and clearing a passage by tossing out luggage and wrecked overhead bins. Inside the plane, a female flight attendant was working frantically to free passengers and co-workers.

All the while, jet fuel streamed off the wing.

Battling fire, smoke, inflated chutes

As soon as the alert reached the firehouse, Emmons suited up and raced with a driver to runway 28L. They were spraying foam on the wreckage when another engine arrived to help.

Most of the 307 passengers and crew already had made their way out. They were wandering nearby or lying on the heat-blistered grass. The first priority was to ensure no one else was inside. Emmons and Lt. Dave Monteverdi repositioned their trucks.

“I saw Dave run up the chute of the aircraft,” Emmons recounted with a slight shake in her voice. “I said if he can do it, I can do it.”

Monteverdi headed to check the cockpit, and Emmons and firefighter Mike Kirk went the other way. Kirk was first to reach the rear of the plane, where the tail gash showed the light of day. That’s where he found five injured passengers, several pinned by debris.

Meanwhile, “the fire was banking down on us,” Emmons said. “We had heavy black smoke.”

Attending to the injured even before first responders arrived was Lee Yoon-hye, the cabin manager. After checking to see that the four pilots were alive, the 40-year-old flight attendant — who has worked for Asiana for 18 years — began helping with the evacuation. It did not go smoothly.

The slide on the first right-hand exit had inflated inward, pinning another flight attendant and nearly suffocating her, Lee said. One pilot rushed into the cockpit to get a “crash ax” to deflate the slide as Lee led passengers off the plane through doors on the left.

She continued toward the rear, evacuating people through other exits. But flames erupted near Row 10, and Lee heard screams for help. A second slide, also on the right, had inflated inward near the fire, pinning a colleague’s leg.

“I grabbed a knife passengers had eaten with from a cart and handed it to the copilot,” Lee said in Korean. “He punctured it.”

The flight attendant was the last crew member to leave the plane, exiting only when it seemed like the top of the cabin was falling in and the rear of the plane was obscured in black smoke.

She later discovered that the initial impact had left her with a broken tailbone.

Meanwhile, firefighters had gotten to the rear of the craft and were helping the injured when they noticed San Francisco Police Officer Jim Cunningham — with no mask and no safety gear — right there beside them.

He had arrived as passengers were coming down the chutes and, along with another officer, tossed his knife to two of the cockpit crew working furiously to free passengers. When he looked through the tail gash, he saw that firefighters needed help. So he began grabbing bags from the collapsed luggage compartments, panels of the plane — “whatever I could to get myself inside there.”

“I thought I was a tough guy and that I could hold my breath,” he said when asked why he took the risk. But as he and Emmons carried the last passenger out on a backboard, “I started coughing,” Cunningham said. “We were trying to hold on to the person with the board and trying not to drop him. The smoke was thick and black and swirling around us.”

They got out. But the concern that some people might still be inside the plane led rescue crews back into the blackening hull two more times, officials said.

An eerie calm after exiting plane

Soon, with the fire controlled and the passengers and crew out of the plane, the triaging began — a job so well done that medical staff at San Francisco General Hospital said many more would have died without the effort.

Ultimately, 182 passengers and crew would be sent to area hospitals. On Monday, 17 remained at San Francisco General Hospital, six of them, including a child, in critical condition. Eight were being treated at Stanford Hospital, one in critical condition.

Cunningham said he could recall little of what happened after he exited the craft, other than dashing around helping the injured. At one point, he spotted an iPhone on the ground — he clicked it on and saw a photo of a mother and daughter. He put it in his back pocket, thinking: “Someone’s going to want this.”

Later in the day, he saw another iPhone. He grabbed that one too.

“This poor person,” he remembered thinking. “This might be the last memories they have of somebody.”

Through it all, emergency personnel said, there was an eerie calm.

“It was so surreal, so much chaos going on, and it was quiet,” said Lt. Gaetano Caltagirone, the San Francisco police incident commander who had climbed on board the plane after Cunningham. “We spoke about this [afterward]. Everybody was doing what they were trained to do — to save lives.”

But there was a sense of darkness Saturday when fire personnel realized that one of the two teens killed in the plane crash may have been run over by an emergency vehicle. The Fire Department said it was conducting an internal review. An outside investigation also was ongoing.

The girls — Ye Mengyuan and Wang Linjia — were part of a group of students from China’s Zhejiang province who had come to California to attend summer camp and visit universities. On Monday, a staff member from Golden International Travel, based in Los Angeles, described a frantic search to locate three missing youths.

The tour group was supposed to show the students around the Bay Area before heading south. Instead, Zoey Zou was dispatched here Saturday to scour hospitals.

A social worker at San Francisco General said one of three passengers in intensive care might be from the group — but Zou said their faces were so badly injured, it wasn’t clear. On Sunday, an instructor identified the patient as a student.

Ye and Wang, it turned out, were Flight 214’s only fatalities.

The tour group now is focused on assisting the students. On Sunday, they fetched two from Stanford Hospital and went to San Francisco to eat and shop for essentials lost in the wreckage, items like glasses and clothes.

“They’re really emotional,” Zou said, “especially those who saw their friends in the crash. It’s so traumatic.”

lee.romney@latimes.com

kate.mather@latimes.com

victoria.kim@latimes.com