Peri dropped his cigarette and sprinted to the burning plane, joining a few other rescuers already scrambling around the opening. “It was an inferno.”
Four decades removed from his Israeli military duties as a landmine specialist, the former soldier’s instincts took hold.
Peri saw a woman sprawled on the floor. “I thought her legs were broken. I’m not a doctor, but her ankles were twisted,” he said.
Peri and another man seized her. “But it was hard to move her,” so Peri took a step into the burning fuselage to get a better grasp. They pulled her out and carried her away from the wreckage.
“She told me, my name is Lorelei. I wiped her face ... she said ‘I can’t feel my legs, my feet’. I was praying to God, please, I don’t want her to have a broken back.” Peri touched her leg, and luckily, she felt it.
She immediately started asking about her husband, Cameron Sobolik, another passenger on the plane. “I could see the fear in her face.” A rescuer sitting with an injured passenger about five metres away said it was Cameron. “Your husband is fine,” Peri told her. “You’ll be going home.”
As emergency crews buzzed around them, Peri sat with Sobolik, cradling her head to prevent her from torquing her injured back. Eventually, a medic came with a stretcher.
After parting ways, Peri said he thought about visiting her, but after a few failed phone attempts to locate her, he decided it could wait. Peri said he’s struggled to keep it together.
“People that know me say I’m a tough guy, but sometimes we’re just human beings.”
When the time is right, he would like to see Sobolik again, he said. “I think seeing her well ... that would give me closure.”
Knowing that she’s still there for her family is a reward for his efforts, Peri said, adding that if God was watching last Thursday, then maybe “He will help my daughter.”
Shawn Nagurny
Shawn Nagurny was sitting at his desk in his office at Shearwater Marine when he heard a big explosion.
He looked out his window, which faces across Russ Baker Way into the runway area, and saw a burning fuselage barrelling down the road toward him with “a big wall of flames behind it.”
“We basically got up screaming ‘plane crash’ and ran out the front door and towards the plane,” he said.
He was amazed to see at least one passenger walk out of the plane on their own. Others were carrying victims out. He didn’t think twice about going into the plane himself, and found an injured woman. He lifted up the front part of her body while another rescuer worked to free her legs, which had become entangled in the seating. The smell of the jet fuel was overpowering.
“It was so thick, you were, like, drinking it. It took me a good day and a half to get the jet-fuel taste out of my mouth,” said Nagurny, who had to throw his shoes away afterward.
“The real thing I can remember is slipping in the jet fuel, because it was all over the ground at the time, and I looked to my left towards the wing and noticed that the fire was just coming up the wing, right toward us. We knew we had to get the lady out, so we really just heaved her and dragged her right out of the plane as fast as we could,” he said, adding that he could see the woman was conscious and feel the heat from the approaching flames.
“Those are the main two things that are just drilled into my head: looking at the lady’s face and then turning towards the wing because of the flames. Other than that, it’s kind of blurry,” he said.
“We knew it was going to go up pretty quick.”
After Nagurny and the other rescuer pulled the woman to safety on the centre island of Russ Baker Way, Nagurny ran back because he knew the pilot and the co-pilot were still in the aircraft. But by then it was engulfed in flames. When the pilot and co-pilot came out on stretchers and Nagurny could see they were still alive, he remembers being overjoyed. On the long drive home to Chilliwack, he thought about how amazing it was that everyone had survived.
“Pretty upsetting to find out that [the pilot] passed away the next morning.” |
發表於 2011-11-1 06:50
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