Thu, Nov 02, 2000 page3

• Survivors tell of terrifying inferno

  DANTEAN VISION For those who walked out of the burning aircraft, the scene was like something straight out of hell, with seatbelts melting in their hands, thick smoke in the cabin and flames shooting down the aisles

  • By Chris Taylor / CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
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  At 3am the list of injured at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital detailed the personal tragedy. Lin Ming-liang (林明良), male, 45, Taiwanese: 80 percent burns. Tonia Joy, 39, New Zealander: spinal injuries. An anonymous "foreign person", male, 39: 100 percent burns.

  Douglas Villirmin, 33, an engineer from Louisiana, was one of the lucky ones.

  Emerging from a hospital ward packed with traumatized and bandaged passengers, he wandered into a melee of journalists in pajamas, a blanket draped over his shoulders.

  

  Tonya Joy, 37, of New Zealand calls home as she is being carried into the operating room of the Chang Gung Memorial Hospital near Chiang Kai-shek International Airport yesterday.

  PHOTO: AP

  He was on the list, too, with a chest contusion. But if he was in physical pain, it was clearly the last thing on his mind. He was too busy re-playing what he called the "nightmare he never wants to live through again."

  "It was like a bomb," he said. "I was at the back of the plane and the cabin began to fill up with smoke. Me and another passenger tried to open an escape hatch at the ground level. Out the window I could see flames everywhere. I didn't want to open the hatch because I thought we would get burned. But we had no choice. We kept trying but it wouldn't budge. People were beginning to panic and scream."

  Steven Courtney, a 45-year-old Briton, suffered burns to 20 percent of his body. "My arms, legs, back," he said with a forced smile. "But, you know, stiff upper lip and all that."

  

  Rescuers carry a victim's body out of the plane's cabin yesterday.

  PHOTO: TONY YAO, TAIPEI TIMES

  Like Villirmin, he had a story to tell, of how the left wing seemed to hit something, and how the plane flipped over and a wall of flames came tearing down the aisle.

  Like Villirmin, he told of a jammed escape hatch. Like Villirmin, he was sitting in the back of the plane.

  In fact, as Soong Yung-kuei (宋永魁), deputy hospital superintendent, explained later in the night, most of the survivors were sitting in the back of the plane. When asked about those sitting forward, he said: "Haven't you seen the pictures? The plane is a burnt-out skeleton."

  The bare facts sketched so plainly by Soong, along with the mounting death-count, go a long way to explaining the indescribable atmosphere of barely-controlled panic, pain at having watched a tragedy unfold and elation at having walked away from a plane crash alive.

  "It's good to be here. It's good to be alive," said Sally Walker, a 41-year-old US citizen who was nursing a bandaged leg flecked with specks of blood and attempting to fill in a hospital admittance form. She looked about ready to break into tears.

  Debra Brosnan, another US citizen, who like Walker was on her way home from a coral reef symposium in Bali, sat at her side. "I did like they say. I had my seat-belt on. But I was thrown out of it."

  Close by, Christina Reed, a 26-year-old Californian, lay in bed with bandaged hands.

  For her the seat-belt held but melted into her hands in the furnace-like heat of the cabin.

  Her burns were listed as 8 percent. The list continued to be updated as the drama of survival played out in the emergency ward of Chiang Kai-shek's International Airport's nearest hospital.
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