Air Crash Salvagers Try to Forget the Unforgettable

Ed Morlan was on the water Jan. 31, in the tumultuous, midnight heaving of the ocean off Anacapa Island, trying not to think.

He hauled like a machine, with hooks and nets, trying not to notice what he hefted aboard. He pulled up cushions and dinner trays. Algae-like clouds of insulation fluff. The unrecognizable bits of broken airplane parts.

And a baby bottle, floating alone among the pieces of Flight 261.

“I’ve been out there a dozen times since. I think about it every time,” said the Simi Valley contractor and pleasure boater, from the comfort of land nearly eight months later. “I have a daughter the exact same age as the littlest baby.”

The salvage of the Alaska Airlines flight, by civilian volunteers and military and police search-and-rescue squads, ended in mid-March. Death certificates have since been issued for all 88 victims. And among the salvage crews--who were trained to save lives, not clean up after their loss--life has gone on.

Some will carry the experience with them forever. Others see it as the past: This is just something they did once.

“Nobody talks about it anymore,” said Mandy Hukkanen, a clerk at Port Hueneme Sportfishing. “It’s something people wanted to put behind them.”

Many of the fishermen refuse to be emotional about that first night, when the waves were crashing, the debris spread for miles, there was flesh in the water, and the sad remnants of everyday lives lost lay scattered on the surface: suitcases, hats, shoes.

These are men who have no problem wrenching a fishhook from their weathered flesh, after all. These are men who say they have swum with sharks. They don’t talk easily about such things.

“I’m a fisherman. We just work,” said Steve Kelly, captain of the Island Tak. “It must have been terrifying. But, personally, I don’t think about that. I just hope it doesn’t happen again.”

The Rev. Dan Green, a pastor and Oxnard Fire and Police Department chaplain, saw overwhelming grief as he worked with rescue units. He saw rescue crews crestfallen to realize there was no one to rescue, Seabees who burst into tears at finding pieces of a baby carriage and people who couldn’t sleep because they could see the crash when they closed their eyes.

The fishermen were used to scooping up fish, not body parts.

“What would they say to their families? How would they describe it?” Green recalled being asked. Now, months later, “it gets easier. They want to talk about it. They want to know if the family members had time for closure.”

Green can’t really answer, of course. He just doesn’t know. One thing he is sure of: The grief will come back.

There are anniversaries ahead. He will be presiding over a memorial in January.

The Ventura County medical examiner wants each family to be reunited with the bodies of their loved ones. In truth, that means whatever remains the salvagers were able to find.

The coroner’s office was able to identify 62 of the 88 bodies through conventional means, such as dental records or by tattoos. Eighteen have been identified by DNA. The last eight are still being tested and the body parts stored at the examiner’s office.

This, some hope, will finally lead to closure, or at least a burial or cremation service. It’s for the families’ peace of mind, Medical Examiner Ronald O’Halloran said.

As tragic as the crash was, the salvage effort did help some locals.

What it did--as terrible as the idea is--was grant the fishing industry a little financial relief. At the time, rockfish was off-limits because of a temporary ban. But otherwise idled fishermen could be of service to the media.

“It saved us,” said Ian Nicholson, a deckhand who had only been working for a month when his boat ferried news crews from “Extra,” ABC News and the Associated Press out to the site. “A lot of us would have gone out of business. Some boats hadn’t gone out in two months.”

But, contrary to some opinions, they say, no fisherman got rich from overcharging the out-of-town media for those weeks.

“Everybody’s still struggling over here,” said Hukkanen. “We’re getting by.”

And there are the small things, such as the Ventura Harbor Patrol’s new emergency action plan. And one of Green’s parishioners telling him, “It really brought a community to me,” and Green knowing exactly what she meant. There was how some of those out amid the waves felt that they were part of something bigger than themselves, that they had a hand in helping 88 grieving families get back something that belonged to them.

“The whole country and the world knew about it, and there were only 100 guys out their picking stuff up, and I was one of them,” said Rick Hubbard, an officer with the Ventura Harbor Patrol who was called out to help.

“Everybody gave everything they had of themselves, and I was one person in that mix,” said Andy Ecsedy, who joined his friend Morlan aboard his boat, the Wannabe. “I saw a bunch of people doing the same thing I was.”

They all go back to the water, to the place where it happened. Some of them go every day. Morlan’s wife questioned him for days after the crash, wondering if he was all right, if he was hurting inside.

He has time to think about it now, but he doesn’t really talk about it much, even to Ecsedy.

Ecsedy thinks about the young victims a lot, he said.

“You have to be able to put it away in one section of your mind, so you don’t have to look at it again,” he said. “Otherwise, it can really get to you.”

These are men who love the ocean. They remember the baby bottle and the baby shoe. Morlan gets goose bumps every time he ventures near the site. But he couldn’t bear to have something keep them away from the waves out there. They can’t avoid that place.

“It’s not the ocean’s fault,” Morlan said, “that it happened right there.”