Sioux City Had Its Emergency Rescue Teams at Ready

Assistant Chief Orville Thiele, a husky, red-haired 25-year veteran of the Sioux City, Iowa, fire department, was at the console at 3:40 p.m. Wednesday when the Woodbury County communications center radioed that a crippled DC-10 airliner was about to crash land.

Thiele was stunned, but not unprepared. The area’s surprisingly well-coordinated fire-and-rescue operations had confronted almost precisely such a problem in an exercise in 1987, and--by lucky coincidence--the emergency services had drilled again just two weeks ago.

“We were all pretty well prepared,” said Patti Bauerly, Thiele’s administrative assistant.

Loses Hydraulic Pressure

As it turned out, they needed everything they could muster. Two minutes later, the communications center radioed again, this time to report that the airliner had lost hydraulic pressure, which meant that the pilot could not use the ailerons, landing flaps and brakes to control the plane.

“All he could do was turn right,” Bauerly said. “And hope.”

Robert White, a Sioux City police official, mused that ordinarily such crashes come without warning. The plane catches fire, or is thrown askew by a wind shear and bolts to the ground instantly. By the time the fire-and-rescue crews arrive, precious time has been lost.

But this time, authorities had about 45 minutes’ notice from the pilot before Flight 232 erupted in a ball of fire, flipped over on its back and crumbled into three huge chunks in a field a half-mile short of the huge 9,000-foot runway at Sioux Gateway airport.

“We had time to coordinate, get a command center set up, start blocking off traffic,” White said. White, Bauerly and almost everyone else who could get to a telephone began calling in off-duty fire and police personnel.

By the time the DC-10 reached the Sioux City area, officials had assembled an array of some 35 fire engines, ambulances, rescue units and police cars, some of them from as far as 30 miles away. Some 200 police and rescue workers eventually gathered on the field.

Maj. Richard Sorenson, a pilot with the Iowa Air National Guard, had just landed his own A-7 single-seat jet fighter and was taxiing toward the hangar when he got a warning from the airport control tower to clear the runway for the crippled Flight 232.

“The suggestion was coming across that he was having severe controllability problems, that he could turn in only one direction and that he was not sure he could make the runway,” Sorenson said at a late evening press conference.

The airliner came in from the east and--obviously with severe difficulty--maneuvered into position to use the southwest runway, which usually remains unused. (Sioux Gateway was a base for B-29 Stratofortresses during World War II. It has the longest runway in the area.)

In Sorenson’s words: “Shortly before touchdown, about the time an airplane would begin to flare, the right wing began to dip and roll, and the nose began to fall, to a position of 15 to 25 degrees. It was very apparent at that moment he could not make a safe landing.

“The only real question was how disastrous the impact would be. . . . There was a huge fireball, black smoke. . . . The plane began disintegrating, huge pieces began cartwheeling from the airplane. . . . There were a lot of things falling off the plane. . . .”

Rescue units sped quickly into the field to carry away survivors who were walking away from the burning wreckage.

Fire Department officials said it took 20 minutes to put out the blaze from the burning jet fuel and airliner. White said they were still searching for bodies Wednesday night when the sun went down and left only the glowing embers.

“They’re starting to walk the fields,” White reported sadly.

“We were as prepared as we could be,” he said.