Vacant Lot Is Reminder of Plane Crash

The planes rumbling off runway 10 still shake houses in the Morningside subdivision and stir E.V. Weems’ saddest memories. His house was the first one hit by the cartwheeling jetliner a decade ago Thursday.

Ten years have blunted the pain of that rainy afternoon when a Boeing 727 slammed into the streets of the close-knit neighborhood. All 146 people on board were killed, along with two adults and six children on the ground.

“It’s better, but I guess it left a lasting effect on all of us. Something like that is bound to,” Weems said.

Pan Am Flight 759 had just taken off for Las Vegas, while a thunderstorm raged over the New Orleans airport on July 9, 1982. It went down less than a mile from the end of the runway.

Officials blamed a microburst, a violent down-draft in a thunderstorm, for spinning the plane into the houses. It was the nation’s third-worst plane crash.

The plane cut a fiery swath, destroying or damaging 15 homes. The vacant lots serve to remind residents of the disaster.

Jennifer Schultz, 11, who lived next door to Weems, died in his carport. Her 7-year-old sister, Rachel, and a 6-year-old friend, Lisa Baye, were killed while watching television. In the house behind the Weemses’, Sandra Giancontieri and her three sons were killed.

Weems and his two sons, then 10 and 11, were on their way home from the grocery store.

“If we’d left the store five minutes earlier we’d be dead,” he said. “It hit our carport and little Jenny, skinned the roof off the three bedrooms and then got the house behind us. It cleaned it off that slab like it was swept with a broom.”

The plane came to rest on Joseph Pace’s house. He wasn’t at home. His wife and two daughters escaped.

“She still doesn’t want to talk about that day,” Pace said. “We had 100 dead people in our yard and ended up with nothing but the clothes on our backs.

“It’s not something you get over. Since that plane crash I wouldn’t get on a plane for anybody.”

Janie May, who lived next door to the Paces, was also at home that day. The plane knocked her house off its foundation and a jet engine rammed her car through the utility shed. She was trapped in the house, unable to open the doors or windows while smoke pouted in from the fire out front. Finally she got out through a back window.

“I got out OK but the memories are awful,” she said. “Sometimes I think they are worse now. Maybe now I’m just starting to remember parts that I had blocked out before.

“I don’t worry about the planes flying over my house now,” May said. “Oh, I may get a little nervous when it rains hard, but not bad. I still get sad though. It was a moment that changed everything for so many. The heartbreak was just like the fire from the plane. It was like ocean waves just going on and on.”

May and other neighbors opposed construction of a crash memorial in the area. She said the vacant lot across the street “is painful enough.”

In 1982, New Orleans had only six wind gauges, and a microburst could develop between them and remain undetected. The airport now has 11 sensors.