Toll in Dutch Air Disaster May Reach 250

As many as 250 people were feared buried beneath a three-story mountain of smoldering rubble Monday after an Israeli cargo plane slammed into their high-rise apartment complex. Rescuers held virtually no hope of finding any survivors beneath the charred ruins of two buildings sheared through the middle during Sunday’s dinner-hour disaster.

Witnesses said panicked mothers threw their children from balconies and windows, then leaped themselves as the inferno roared through the buildings after the plane crashed.

Preliminary investigation indicated that mechanical trouble--not sabotage--caused the El Al Boeing 747-200F to lose both starboard engines and crash 15 minutes after takeoff from Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport.

Investigators from Israel and the United States arrived to help Dutch authorities determine what happened to the jet, which was ferrying perfume, electronic equipment and textiles to Tel Aviv. Some have noted similarities between Sunday’s accident and the crash of a China Airlines Boeing 747-200 cargo jet after it lost both starboard engines near Taipei, Taiwan, on Dec. 29, 1991.

Boeing officials said Monday that they have prepared an advisory recommending that airlines inspect the “fuse pins” holding engine pylons to the wings of various 747 models for possible cracking and corrosion damage.

Only 13 bodies had been found by Monday, and rescuers were able to retrieve just six of them. A special crane gingerly hoisted the shrouded gurneys from the pile of twisted metal and broken concrete. Officials said it could take weeks before all victims are recovered.

Hundreds of onlookers stood in a cold wind to watch the grim labors of the 300 or so emergency personnel scouring the area.

Natural gas lines were dug up and shut off, but City Council spokeswoman Sabine Ruitenbeek said there was still a slight risk of explosion “because we don’t know what flammable things people had stored in their flats, like paint or oil.”

Searchers began draining a pond in front of the site Monday night to look for more bodies and for the plane’s two flight recorders, which tape flight data and cockpit voices; they help determine a crash’s cause.

“The only thing I saw was fire,” said Don Danquah, who lived on the eighth floor of one building and, with two brothers and two of their wives, dashed through the flames to safety. “We were watching TV, and I just saw fire.

“One of my neighbors lost three children,” Danquah said outside an emergency shelter at a nearby sports arena. “The children died,” he repeated in disbelief. “They died.”

Officials said that pilot Isaac Fuchs tried to avert disaster for nine harrowing minutes after the control tower heard him cry “Mayday!” at 6:27 p.m., just 17 1/2 miles east of the airport. After jettisoning most of his craft’s fuel in a lake--a move that probably prevented an even worse explosion--Fuchs tried to circle back to the airport for an emergency landing, officials said.

“He tried to correct the plane up to the last minute,” Transportation Minister Hanja Maij-Weggen told journalists. “Then he said, ‘Going down,’ meaning he was crashing. These were his last words.”

The plane exploded into a ball of flame as it hit the apex of two neighboring 10-story buildings in a densely populated housing project in suburban Amsterdam. Fuchs, his crew of two and a passenger were among those presumed dead. Nineteen people remained hospitalized Monday, including at least two children.

“By 9 or 10 p.m. we realized the worst had happened because no ambulances were coming any more,” said John Kortenray, spokesman for Amsterdam Medical Center, the country’s biggest hospital, which is just a few miles from the crash site. “I know it sounds very strange, but you hope to get patients. That means people have survived.”

But the beds remained empty. The hospital staff, instead, found itself focusing on emotional support for the dozens of shocked survivors and relatives who had rushed there, hoping to find a missing family member or friend alive.

“Most are dead,” Kortenray said. “The heat and the fire were enormous. They couldn’t do anything at all.”

But there were miracles, too. “There was a little boy here, a 3-year-old, who was thrown from the burning building and people down below caught him,” Kortenray said, adding that he did not know how many floors the toddler fell. “His mother jumped, and she is injured. But I have seen the child, and he’s laughing and cheerful, and perfectly all right.”

Another mother, Ruth Atucehene, told reporters how she jumped from a second-floor window with her son, 3, and daughter, 6, who she had initially feared was trapped. The Ghanaian immigrant said her living room was ablaze when she heard her little girl screaming, “Mama, mama help me! Mama help me, help me!”

“I cannot go inside because the fire is coming,” the mother said.

Atucehene told the Reuters news agency that her daughter then appeared suddenly at another window and all three were able to jump to safety.

City Council spokesman Cees Van Hullenaar confirmed that “it’s nearly impossible but somebody could still be found alive.” He said searchers had to move slowly and cautiously because “it’s not a stable situation yet” and the buildings could collapse further.

Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands visited the site with Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers. She clasped her hand to her mouth in horror and visibly fought tears as she viewed the crash site.

Amid the blackened jumble of what used to be living rooms and kitchens and nurseries lay eerie reminders--a stuffed animal, a bicycle, a flower box--of the lives that disappeared in that one horrible instant.

City officials estimate that 260 to 280 people were left homeless by the disaster, which Mayor Ed van Thijn described as “the largest catastrophe ever in the postwar history of the Netherlands.”

Most of those living in the dreary complex were Third World immigrants, and officials worry that illegal aliens uncounted among the known missing may have perished.

In comparing the Taiwan crash with the Amsterdam disaster, some experts have noted that the right-hand engines fell from both planes moments after takeoff, and both jets crashed, killing all aboard, before they could return to the airport.

Engines Nos. 3 and 4 on the right wing of the El Al plane were last overhauled in June, and nothing unusual was noted then, said Jack Gamble, a Boeing spokesman in Seattle.

William N. Curry, another Boeing spokesman, said Monday that because of reports of corrosion and cracking on other planes, the company has prepared a service bulletin calling for the inspection of the engine pylon pins on a number of 747 models. Similar inspections were ordered previously.

Times staff writer Eric Malnic in Los Angeles contributed to this report.