Volunteers Help Survivors of Crash Battle the Cold, Darkness and Pain : Aviation: Site is an exclusive neighborhood known for its tranquility. A doctor uses tree branches for splints.

Peering through the chill and rainy darkness, Carlos Montero was stunned at what he saw. The tail of a jetliner jutted like a rising moon amid the thicket of trees at the end of the secluded little road where he lives.

His first impulse was to keep his distance for fear of an explosion or fire, Montero recalled Friday, but when he heard voices calling for help, his training as an orthopedic surgeon took over.

Montero tried to get to the most badly hurt first. For splints, he used anything he could find, including tree branches and pieces of fiberglass from the door of the Avianca Boeing 707. “It was triage, because there were so many people, and in the beginning, there was not much help,” Montero said.

Nothing like this had ever happened in this hamlet of 400 people, which includes what was once President Theodore Roosevelt’s famous Sagamore Hill estate. Tranquility is what draws the privileged to these houses on Oyster Bay Harbor, set several acres apart and selling for a half-million dollars and up.

Thursday night, however, tragedy intruded, when Flight 52 slammed into a hillside at the end of Tennis Court Road. Slogging through mud with flashlights, neighbors labored side by side with police and firefighters to pull survivors from the wreckage, some from under the bodies of the dead.

Inside the plane, Jorge Lozano, a 59-year-old Bogota executive headed to New York on business, unbuckled the belt that had held him in seat 4F and slid as far as he could through a hole in the fuselage.

Wait Seems Endless

The half-hour wait for help seemed endless, as people around him screamed and groaned. One teen-ager kept begging: “Please help my mother, because she’s trapped under her seat,” Lozano recalled Friday in an interview from his stretcher in the North Shore University Hospital emergency room.

Getting the injured to the 14 area hospitals that awaited them was difficult, because the only way out was a narrow road, which quickly jammed with rescue vehicles and hundreds of curious people skirting police barriers to see a disaster first-hand.

“Why can’t people just stay home and let an emergency be an emergency?” one neighbor complained.

The delay was such that Glen Cove Community Hospital, one of the closest to the scene, did not get its first patient until two hours after the crash, hospital spokesman Steven Bernstein said.

In the interim, nurses and doctors did what they could at the scene, attaching IV lines and administering painkillers in several makeshift field hospitals, including one on the front yard of the white stucco mansion of John McEnroe Sr., the father of the tennis star. In another section of the McEnroe yard, yellow body bags were laid out in neat rows.

One of the first to arrive was Oyster Bay Fire Chief Tom Reardon, who said he quickly began “ordering everything we had in the world here.” By his estimate, at least 160 rescuers showed up from area communities, including New York City.

“We found two babies in the ravine. They were thrown from the plane,” Reardon said. Both were alive.

In retrospect, Montero and several of his neighbors said they found it curious that they heard no roar of engines, only the sudden boom of the plane hitting the wooded hillside. The 707 sheared about a dozen treetops and lay in three pieces within 20 feet of one house. The house was undamaged, except for its deck, which was ripped off by the nose of the jetliner.

The house’s occupants, uninjured, were not available for comment. Next door, Tom McCarthy said he had been watching television when he heard a boom that his wife thought was a loud clap of thunder, but that he suspected to be the crash of a small plane. The darkness was so thick that he could not see the huge 707 that had plowed into the ground only a few hundred feet from his front door.

Grim Routine Begins

With a cold rain drenching them Friday afternoon, crews of police, utility repairmen and firefighters settled into the grim routine of cleaning up. They piled luggage, strollers, handbags and other personal belongings onto trucks. National Transportation Safety Board inspectors showed up to begin trying to figure out what happened.

But for some families, daylight did not bring an end to the nightmare.

Riding a shuttle bus with others in his situation, 45-year-old Pedro Betancourt was at his fourth hospital in his search for his wife, Gloria, who had been visiting relatives in Colombia.

He clutched at every fading hope. “Maybe she got her papers mixed up, maybe they have her under a different name,” he said. “They say there’s three people they haven’t identified yet who are still alive.”

Later Friday afternoon, he was among the 300 men and women waiting patiently and sadly at the end of the line--the morgue at Nassau County Medical Center, where they would get a chance to see if they could find their loved ones among the unidentified bodies.

For others, such as 11-year-old Michael Gomez of Stamford, Conn., there was jubilation. It had taken a search of five hospitals to account for his parents, two younger sisters and brother. The entire family survived.

“It’s a miracle,” said Jaime Cano, 22, who had been baby sitting Michael Gomez while his family was in Colombia.

Bonds forge quickly in an ordeal, and some passengers, while grateful for their own survival, were anxious to hear how others had fared.

Lozano, the Colombian businessman, was having difficulty speaking, his tongue swollen and bruised. Still, he wanted to know from a reporter: “Do you know if Nestor Zamora survived? I met him at the airport in Bogota. He’s a friend of mine.”

Times staff writers John J. Goldman and David Treadwell contributed to this story.