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Diary of a Disaster

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

DAY 1

The nightmare begins with a boom and a splash.

For the record:

12:00 a.m. Feb. 7, 2000 For the Record
Los Angeles Times Monday February 7, 2000 Home Edition Part A Page 3 Metro Desk 1 inches; 28 words Type of Material: Correction
Squid boat--In recent coverage of the crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261, the name of a squid fishing boat used to search for survivors has been spelled incorrectly. The vessel is named Calogera A.

An ear-splitting thud unlike anything squid fisherman Tony Alfieri has ever heard. And a splash that shoots 200 feet into the sky, a wall of water so thunderous that the veteran skipper immediately knows something has gone horribly wrong.

En route from Ventura Harbor to the fishing grounds off the Channel Islands, his boat is less than a mile from the spot where Alaska Airlines Flight 261 has tumbled out of the sky and slammed into the sea. Nose first. And belly up, its fractured fuselage quickly swallowed by the 50-degree waters off the Ventura County coast.

Alfieri knows none of this yet. Still, he turns his boat, the Calegara A, toward the point of impact and races to the scene, guided by a cream-colored fuel slick and a gut-churning trail of debris.

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“Oh my God,” he says as his vessel pounds through choppy seas gurgling with airplane wreckage and human remains. “This is not a good deal.”

Miles away on the Port Hueneme Pier, Greg Alonzo is doing some late-afternoon fishing with his 8-year-old daughter, Alicia, when she frantically tugs at his shirt.

“Look, daddy, look, there’s a plane falling,” the youngster says, pointing skyward.

Alonzo scans the horizon, but the plane has already completed its terrifying, corkscrew plunge into the Pacific. Alonzo figures his daughter is seeing things--until he begins hearing the buzz about the crash.

“It’s a horrible thing,” the 28-year-old Port Hueneme resident later says. “Now they’re in God’s hands.”

Dozens of boats race to the wreckage, guided by the same grisly trail of leaking fuel and bobbing flotsam.

Coast Guard cutters, a Navy warship and a Ventura Harbor Patrol cruiser. Fishing boats and squid boats, the latter training their powerful lamps on the roiling ocean in a desperate search for any sign of the jetliner’s 88 passengers and crew.

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With the late-afternoon sky quickly fading to black, shading the water from gray to charcoal, those signs come in horrifying flashes.

The ocean is littered with suitcases and seat cushions, tennis shoes and tray tables. There is a set of eye glasses here, a handbag over there. One rescue worker retrieves a baby’s bottle, another fishes out a pair of sneakers that appear to belong to a child no older than 2.

The water reeks of jet fuel. Helicopters circle overhead.

Through the chaos, rescue workers dip hooks and nets into the human soup, snaring anything that floats. They hope to find someone, anyone, alive.

“You never really want to give up,” says Ventura Harbor Patrol Officer Pat Hummer, who along with two fellow officers sweep the ocean all night in a 28-foot patrol boat loaded with life vests, first aid and rescue gear.

“But you know the real reason you’re out there is not so much for the people on the plane but for the families of the victims,” he adds. “They’d want you to try everything you can.”

This is how it starts--a selfless and hectic week in response to the county’s worst tragedy at sea.

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In a community that has endured earthquake, fires and flood, never do so many people pull together in such a desperate race against time.

The Alaska Airlines MD-83 loses radar contact at 4:21 p.m. Monday and five minutes later a U.S. Park Service employee on Anacapa Island reports seeing the jetliner’s fatal plunge.

At 4:27 p.m. the Coast Guard issues an emergency broadcast, calling on every available boat to help search for survivors. It follows by dispatching its own fleet, sending out every available vessel from San Diego to San Francisco.

There is no way rescue workers can prepare for what they are about to see.

“Nobody here has ever dealt with something of this magnitude,” Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Randy Mitchell says.

Eric Hermann and Matt Keegan are among the boaters who race to the scene shortly after the Coast Guard issues its plea.

At first, they see mainly airplane parts, bits of smashed fuselage. Then body parts, thickened in the water, nearly indistinguishable from the bits of wreckage.

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The pair scoop up what they can with hooks and nets, trying to separate and match as they go. And when the 36-foot vessel is full, they head to the Port of Hueneme, where a makeshift morgue has been set up.

There are no signs of survivors, but Hermann and Keegan say they will be out before sunrise the next day to try again.

“You just never know,” Hermann says.

DAY 2

The sun is out and the seas are calmer Tuesday morning, but spirits are lower than the day before.

It is the second day of the exhaustive search off Anacapa Island. But it is far different from Day 1.

Coast Guard officials are still calling it a rescue mission. In fact, more than 300 Coast Guard and 800 Navy personnel scour the Pacific for survivors throughout the day.

But as the hours pass, and the full scope of the tragedy emerges, hope fades.

“This is still a search for human lives,” Coast Guard Vice Adm. Tom Collins says. “We will continue our effort throughout the day until I believe there is no chance for survival.”

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And so they do.

By sunrise, at least two dozen boats already are at sea, sweeping the ocean for chunks of wreckage and maintaining the increasingly unlikely hope of finding survivors. An hour later, a dozen more vessels join the hunt.

Coast Guard cutters slice through water, trailed by smaller vessels whose crew members scan the white water churned up by the bigger boats. Helicopters, also whipping up the water, hover just above the ocean surface, their crews also scanning the surface.

Five bags of human remains are gathered before noon and hundreds of pounds of debris are collected. There is still no sign of survivors.

Ventura squid fisherman Brian Riley keeps at it throughout the day and night, hoping--and praying--for a miracle. He had arrived at the crash site about 8 the night before, two hours after learning about the downed jetliner. He expected to be on the water a full 24 hours before giving up.

He hadn’t thought twice about going out. But nothing he had ever experienced--not even the loss of a brother and sister in a car crash years earlier--prepared him for the carnage at sea.

“As a fellow human being, even without thinking, I was able to help,” the 38-year-old boat captain says. “But hopefully, this is something I can forget.”

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Away from the water, safety officials set out to solve a mystery.

Ten investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board arrive at the Point Mugu Naval Air Station early Tuesday to launch a probe into the disaster.

A team of FBI agents also rolls into town, hitching rides on recovery boats trolling the 700-foot-deep Santa Barbara Channel.

Those efforts are aided by a local support network put in place during the first frantic hours after the crash.

At the county’s emergency operations center, officials are monitoring the crisis and responding where needed. The local effort is winning high praise. Officials call it a measure of the community’s spirit.

“This is what we do,” says Laura Hernandez, assistant director of the county’s Office of Emergency Services. “We have to be ready for anything and everything.”

Of course, there are some things for which no one can fully prepare.

By late Tuesday, it is evident that those aboard Flight 261 have been lost to the sea. But there also are victims among the living, a wider circle of family members and friends for whom the tragedy has not yet reached its apex.

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They begin arriving in Ventura County late Tuesday afternoon, red-eyed and fatigued. They check into local hotels, where grief counselors wait.

Time is running out. And everyone knows it.

Several local hotel operators set aside blocks of rooms for family members and friends, as well as rescue workers and safety officials working to unlock the mystery of the doomed flight.

Mark Le Blanc, spokesman for the Country Inn and Suites, offers to act as a clearinghouse for other hotels to find as many rooms as possible at area hotels.

“They have a lot more things to worry about than looking for hotel rooms,” he says.

DAY 3

Wednesday puts an official end to any hope left.

First thing in the morning, the Coast Guard abandons its search for survivors. What had been a search-and-rescue mission becomes a search-and-salvage operation.

Nearly 40 hours after the crash, rescue workers have not found any survivors and only four of the 88 victims. Coast Guard officials say they will continue to search for debris. But there is no longer any chance of finding anyone alive.

For some family members, who had nothing but hope to hold onto, the news provides yet another punch in a bruising emotional battle to come to terms with the tragedy.

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Some families urge the Coast Guard to keep searching. Others simply ask that bodies be retrieved so that they can bury their loved ones and find some closure.

“I was very candid, very frank,” says Vice Adm. Collins, after breaking the news to families and friends. “We have tried to give every chance for success in finding survivors. I believe the decision we are making today is the right decision.”

It is as if the entire county is suddenly thrown into mourning.

Makeshift memorials spring up along the sun-drenched beaches. They are made up of colorful flowers, candles and balloons.

The most elaborate memorial--within a few yards of the Seabee base that now serves as the command post for search and recovery efforts--includes stuffed animals and a 5-foot wooden cross draped with seashell necklaces and rosary beads.

The offerings draw some of the victims’ friends and family. But mostly they attract a pilgrimage of strangers, people coming together to express their collective sorrow.

About 50 students at Hueneme Christian School leave class Wednesday afternoon and walk about five blocks to a small memorial near the base of the Port Hueneme pier.

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The students pray for the victims and their families. They pray for rescue workers. Then they each lay a single flower at the shrine.

“I was amazed by how much they wanted to express their feelings,” says Debbie Steed, the school’s office manager. Her 12-year-old daughter, Rebekah, helped organize the ceremony.

At midmorning, with the sun shining and the water a flat calm, three families who lost loved ones in the crash of Flight 261 sail out to sea to grieve by themselves.

Fishing boat captain Fred Mathis ferries the family members to the wreckage site, the first such visit by relatives. They hold a prayer service and take turns sharing memories. After a moment of silence, they lay red-and-white carnations on the water.

As the fishing vessel turns for shore, officers line the deck of a circling Coast Guard cutter in a “Dead Man’s Salute.”

“There’s no way you cannot be touched by that,” says Mathis, a burly 52-year-old Vietnam veteran, moved to tears by the display.

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“These people don’t have any closure, they don’t have a human to put in the ground,” he says. “I feel as though I did the best I could for them.”

DAY 4

Thursday is a day filled with searing images.

Investigators get their first look at the wreckage on the ocean floor, as an underwater robot flashes haunting scenes of the plane’s tail--complete with the airline’s distinctive logo of a smiling Alaskan native.

Grainy television pictures of federal safety officials retrieving the aircraft’s flight data recorder from the emerald depths appear every hour. The black box is hustled to Washington, where officials hope it will help solve the mystery of Flight 261’s spiral into the sea.

But mostly there are somber images of a community in mourning. A skywriter blazes a cross and a heart in the midday sky above the Santa Monica Mountains. A caravan of buses pushes into Ventura County, delivering 200 family and friends of the victims to a private seaside memorial.

A flotilla of balloons, set loose at sunset over the Port Hueneme pier, drifts toward the heavens as mourners sing “Amazing Grace.”

Sudden death, especially on such a large scale, jars a collective conscience.

“It’s right there in our front yard--you can taste it, feel it, smell it,” says United Airlines flight attendant Karen Massey, who each day has visited memorials to honor the dead near her Silver Strand home.

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“I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to go out to the beach again and see it quite the same way,” she says. “It’s touched our lives forever.”

Even as they return to routine business, squid fishermen who joined the search for survivors three days ago struggle to erase the images of that first night.

“It’s been a real eerie kind of feeling around here,” says 31-year-old Todd Vandersyde, cracking open a beer at Channel Islands Harbor after returning from a night on the squid grounds.

“Right where that plane crashed we do a lot of sets,” he says. “Even though I didn’t know anyone on that plane, the feeling will always be there.”

Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) spends a good part of the morning getting briefed by Coast Guard and Navy commanders, who rave about the county’s response to the crisis.

“You can train all your life for a tragedy like this one,” Gallegly says, “but until you’re faced with this grim work it’s beyond comprehension.”

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Later, he accepts an invitation to meet with relatives who travel from their Los Angeles hotel to a pristine beach at the Navy-controlled Port of Hueneme for a vigil to honor their lost loved ones.

Tears in their eyes, mothers, fathers and children gather in small groups for support, or split away for solitary minutes of reflection as the crashing surf drowns out all noise.

Together, they fill a large wooden chest with hundreds of flowers, which are flown by a Navy helicopter to the crash site nine miles away and released over the water. Individually, friends and family drop flower petals into the surf.

“You could see the pain,” Gallegly says of the ceremony. “You could feel the pain.”

DAY 5

The day breaks to storm clouds and choppy seas, though the surf is nowhere near as bad as it was when the jetliner made its dive into the deep.

The sense of urgency is gone Friday. But Navy vessels continue to map the wreckage site, a three-mile by five-mile stretch of ocean north of Anacapa Island.

Coast Guard crews maintain aggressive patrols, preventing civilian boats from coming too close.

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Four days after Flight 261 fell into the ocean, the waters off Ventura County no longer resemble a seaborne traffic jam. Only a few boats venture out of the harbor. No debris floats on the surface.

Many of the news crews have gone. And many of the fishermen who had ferried reporters and photographers to the crash site are back at their jobs.

“The focus has been shifting from the actual wreckage and actual crash to how the community has been reacting,” says Matt Keegan, one of the commercial boaters who had raced to the crash site Monday night.

“But this isn’t about us,” Keegan adds. “It’s about the families. What we’re going through is not even a tenth of what the families must be going through.”

Squid fisherman Scott Jarvis wants more than anything to bring some solace to the family of two victims.

On that long, dark night, as the Oxnard boat captain skimmed the ocean’s surface, he collected a Mason’s ring, made of gold and crowned with three red stones. He later learned that it belonged to passenger Bob Williams, 65, of Poulsbo, Wash., who died with his wife, Patty, 63, in the crash.

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Jarvis arranged to deliver the ring to the couple’s daughter, Tracy Knizek, who believed it was a sign from her father. After all, they had made a promise. Whoever died first would let the other know that things were OK.

But the bittersweet story takes a strange twist Friday, when Ventura County sheriff’s deputies show up at Jarvis’ home demanding the ring. Deputies say it’s evidence in the ongoing investigation into the crash. They threaten arrest if the ring is not returned.

Scott Jarvis and his wife Mary stand their ground, saying they intend to keep their promise to the Williams family. By midafternoon, sheriff’s deputies drop their request.

“There’s no question who the ring belongs to,” Mary Jarvis says. “It belongs to this man and his family.”

The strange standoff over a dead man’s ring is just one element in an agonizing search for answers that consumes many.

That search is the reason why federal investigators continue to plumb the ocean’s depths. And why local clergy continue to search for spiritual clues to the tragedy.

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“I think it’s a fool that says God had a plan,” says Port Hueneme Pastor Dan Green, who has spent the week comforting rescue workers. “That’s trite. That’s misinformation. When these accidents happen it brings to mind that the rain falls on the just and the unjust.

“It happens.”

DAY 6

More memorials. More mourning. And more bodies.

As local ministers prepare for Sunday services to shed some understanding of the mysteries that remain about the crash, the community continues to grieve.

About 60 people gather on the beach near the Port Hueneme pier Saturday morning, holding hands and bowing their heads in prayer. Kayakers and surfers paddle beyond the breakers to form a floating semicircle of mourners in the chilly waters outside Channel Island Harbor.

And near Ventura, surfers hold hands and form their own prayer circle about 100 yards offshore, tossing flowers and wreaths into the water as a school of dolphins moves nearby.

The day is dedicated to honoring the dead. But the tragedy promises to soon return to the grim tasks that remain.

The county coroner’s office, bolstered by a large federal disaster team, is continuing the difficult chore of identifying crash victims from body parts and clothing gathered from the ocean’s surface--a process that could take months.

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And then there is the question of future legal repercussions--including the outcome of two recent federal investigations into work performed by mechanics at an Alaska Airlines facility where heavy maintenance was performed on the company’s aircraft.

On Saturday, the Navy continues to map the wreckage, using a sonar device aboard a deep-diving robot that recovered the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder.

And more grim discoveries are made. The Coast Guard says more bodies have been recovered in addition to the four found immediately after the crash. And sonar mapping reveals the presence of human remains on the ocean floor.

Federal investigators say no decision has been made on how much of the wreckage will be recovered from the ocean floor.

And so for now, most of the plane lies in pieces on hard-packed sand about 700 feet under the surface.

At the end of a week of tragedy unmatched in the memory of most county residents, the sea so far has given up only some of the answers that surround the crash. Much of the mystery still belongs to her, still hidden beneath the waves.

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Times staff writers in Ventura County contributing to this week’s coverage of the Alaska Airlines crash were Tina Dirmann, Anna Gorman, Daryl Kelley, Gary Polakovic, Catherine Saillant, Matt Surman, Margaret Talev and Tracy Wilson. Also contributing were Times Community News reporters Catherine Blake, Katie Cooper Tony Lystra, Gina Piccalo, Scott Steepleton and Holly J. Wolcott. Times staff photographers covering the crash were Bryan Chan, Carlos Chavez, Anne Cusack, Ricardo De Aratanha, Steve Osman and Spencer Weiner.

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