EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was reposted Sept. 8, 2022, to remember the 28th anniversary of the crash of USAir Flight 427.
HOPEWELL TWP. — It didn’t make sense.
The ambulances were empty, idling in the sea of blue and red lights at Green Garden Plaza. Emergency medical technicians listened and waited.
Crews on the hill radioed for water needed here, warned of a fire there.
But the calls for patients never came.
Aliquippa firefighter Joe Trone soon realized he wasn’t going to be able to save any of the 132 people on board USAir Flight 427, but all he and the other first responders in the parking lot staging area could do was wonder.
“You start thinking about what you’ve seen on the news before from the plane crashes, the huge parts of planes,” Trone, now a fire captain for the city, recalled.
But as the then-24-year-old part-timer followed the hose lines up the darkening wooded hillside to the crash site, what he saw was unlike anything he imagined.
“There was no airplane. There was just debris everywhere,” Trone said. “I was awestruck as to the amount of devastation.”
Trone and his fellow firefighters spent several hours putting out fires at the scene on Sept. 8, 1994, but it took several days until he could put that night out of his mind.
The emotional impacts of the crash were felt far beyond the site in Hopewell Township, and though most people have been able to move forward in the 20 years since, the memories of the disaster are still vivid for many, including Trone.
‘In control of the uncontrollable’
There was a collective gasp in the room when the USAir officials announced shortly after midnight that no one had survived.
Family members and friends of the Flight 427 passengers and crew stood frozen-faced in the USAir Club, where they had been waiting for hours for news.
“Then, after what seemed like a long time, there was an outcry of shock,” recalled Bob Fisher, a psychotherapist and the administrator of clinical services at Heritage Valley Staunton Clinic.
There was disbelief.
“Some people could not believe that they were hearing what their ears were perceiving,” Fisher said. “Could this possibly be true?”
There was anger, particularly among some of the men who felt they were kept in the dark, Fisher said. And then there was a strong desire to go to the crash site.
“That is a natural human reaction, to help out in any way that you can and to still hope for survivors,” Fisher said.
Fisher and his critical incident stress debriefing (CISD) team from Staunton immediately began to assure the individuals that their reactions were normal, and empower them to do something practical, but meaningful, such as find a telephone number and call a family member.
“On the one hand you’re helping people understand their emotions, but on the other hand, we’re trying to get their cognitive processes to take place, to begin to problem-solve through the situation,” Fisher said. “It makes you feel that you’re back in control of the uncontrollable.”
Normalizing a traumatic experience is an important part of CISD — now more commonly known as critical incident stress management — but an experience such as the crash of Flight 427 was anything but normal.
“We all fear trauma,” Fisher said. “I think we fear trauma — unexpected trauma — more than we fear death. Death is something we expect. (But) to have our loved ones die in an aircraft accident is not something that we expect; it’s not something that we are prepared for.”
‘Can only take so much’
Many of the people headed to Hopewell after the crash did not fully comprehend what had happened until they saw the plume of smoke signaling the site — and size — of the impact.
Pittsburgh Fire Chief Darryl Jones, then an Aliquippa fire captain, had just finished a shift and was preparing to leave the station when the first calls came over the scanner.
“I’m still in my head thinking, ‘Nah, this isn’t happening,’” Jones said of the ride to Green Garden. “’It’s got to be an ultralight or a smaller plane like a Cessna, but not an airliner, especially at the shopping plaza.’”
Rich Boland, then UPMC emergency medical services coordinator, knew exactly what he and his CISD team would find, though, as they flew in by helicopter from the city. The Vietnam veteran had been called upon to rescue survivors or recover soldiers’ bodies from plane crashes during the war.
He was being called upon again to help the rescue and recovery workers for Flight 427.
Boland, who has since retired, set up shop in the pizza place at the plaza, curtaining off rooms where therapists would check in with workers after a shift, which was eventually capped at four hours.
“Even in the military, your exposure to that kind of trauma and that kind of carnage, you can’t tolerate more than about four hours,” Boland said. “You need to get out and give your brain a rest, give your mind a rest and give your body a rest.”
Jones, one of the first emergency responders to arrive at the scene, spent more than eight hours on the hill that night, and said he felt blessed to be OK.
“I remember speaking to my mother about it,” Jones recalled. “And I said, ‘(Do) you think something’s wrong with me because I’m good, I’m not having any trouble?’ And she said, ‘No, you just have a praying mother so you don’t have to worry about it.’ ”
Jones knew some of his colleagues struggled emotionally after the crash. Other things throughout his career have stuck with him.
“It was explained to me that we are like cups, and we can only take so much and then we start to overflow. And once we start to overflow and it starts to empty out, then we can take some more,” Jones said. “So maybe I was empty at the time.”
Boland tried giving the recovery workers a goal to keep them focused and healthy: Get the families their loved ones back. Although no one can fully prepare for such a disaster, training drills and standard procedures help first responders get through the difficult tasks they face, Fisher explained.
“You can imagine how horrific and grisly it is to be assigned the task of going out to make sense of body parts, and body parts that are not organized in a whole remain, but body parts that are strewn all over the place that don’t match what you’re seeing,” Fisher said.
“Momentarily, in order to cope with something like this, it’s beneficial to focus on the task at hand,” he said. “You have to be thinking about your procedures and what you go through.”
That’s how Trone got through the first night.
“At one point, you just (knew) what you had to do, and you just did it,” he said. “You got it done and you got out of it, so to speak, not really (thinking) too much about what was around you.”
For a while, at least.
“Once you get home, unwind, and then it hits you,” Trone said, adding that it was hard to sleep and he felt moody for a few days.
Department leaders stressed that no one should try to deal with difficult feelings on their own, Trone said. He talked to his girlfriend (now wife), and she listened and supported him until he felt “back to normal.”
That night solidified Trone’s desire to be a firefighter, but the carnage still sticks out in his memory.
“It was just the destruction. To think this happened in less than a minute,” he said. “That much loss of life in less than a minute.”
Concentric circles
“When you think about disaster, I would like you to imagine a set of concentric circles,” Fisher said.
There is an epicenter made up of people who are directly affected and have the most acute emotional experiences, and then the circles of people and the impacts on them expand outward.
For weeks after the crash, Fisher and other mental health professionals, counselors and clergy members worked with hundreds of individuals, from families and friends, to first-responders and crash investigators, to airline employees, community members and even one another.
Counselors including Anna Mae Paladina, then assistant director of the Beaver County Prevention Project, watched for signs that the stress was becoming too much and referred people for more help if they needed it.
Staunton Clinic, then part of Sewickley Valley Hospital, took 200 phone calls concerning the crash, and worked with more than 200 people through the various services and activities that it offered in the aftermath, Fisher said.
Organizations reached out. The Prevention Project held a class to help parents talk to their kids about the crash, and a “walk and talk” event where people could get their feelings out and get some fresh air.
And Aliquippa’s chaplain, the Rev. Steven McKeown, along with other local church leaders, organized a public memorial service Sept. 27 at Green Garden, followed by a private trip to the crash site for the victims’ families.
McKeown, who is trained in CISD and has responded to several aircraft accidents in the years since Flight 427 as a chaplain for the FBI, said many people ask “Why?” and “Where was God?” after such disasters.
“Whenever this kind of stuff happens, people who have a faith, tradition, sometimes that gets terribly challenged and … it can either be very confusing or they can still see God’s hand in the aftermath,” he said.
Even some individuals who weren’t directly connected to the crash were still deeply affected by it, Fisher pointed out.
“We identify with the families,” Fisher said. “We think … ‘That plane could come down right in my neighborhood.’”
There was an outpouring of support from the community, something Fisher said was an important acknowledgement of what the Flight 427 families were going through. It also was important for many of them to find a sense of community with others who shared the same experiences, such as through support groups.
“It isn’t something profound that a counselor is going to say. It isn’t some advice that’s going to come out of the mouth of a psychiatrist or a social worker,” Fisher said. “It’s the feeling of being understood … Whether you’re talking about it, or whether you’re just having a cup of coffee, talking about the weather.”
After a while, talking became difficult even for the trained professionals, and many of the groups called in therapists for their own debriefing.
Paladina said she was struck by the things that recovery workers found, and the ways they related them to their own lives.
“Tiny fingers; people talked about finding children’s fingers,” she said. “One man talked about finding a wedding ring. … It’s so gruesome, but those were the images that you wanted to get out of your head after listening to some of the people talk.”
In the wake of an aviation accident or similar disaster, more than 90 percent of people who are emotionally affected are able to recover, Fisher said. But fewer than 10 percent do not.
“That means they get stuck with those emotions and they stay fresh with them, and that’s when it becomes a mental-health condition like post-traumatic stress disorder and you need further treatment,” Fisher explained.
PTSD was still a relatively new diagnosis in 1994, and CISD protocols were not established yet in many communities. Many of those involved with Flight 427 became experts overnight and received requests from all over the country to share what they had learned afterward.
‘A different perspective’
Even after so many years, an important memory can sometimes feel as if it happened yesterday, and at other times seem like ancient history, Fisher said. “It’s part of who we are as humans.”
He said it’s also important to make meaning of things such as the crash of Flight 427, and anniversaries are often a way to do so. “It’s a time to think back about what happened and to honor those who were involved.”
Some people don’t want to conjure up those old feelings, but Fisher said some others see anniversaries as an opportunity to let in certain emotions that they weren’t able to before.
“Anniversaries are a time to reminisce,” he said. “It’s a time to take yourself back to the original situation, but from a different perspective.”
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This article originally appeared on Beaver County Times: Times Archive: Moving on: Emotional trauma and recovery after USAir Flight 427