A BROTHEL IN BASEL, SWITZERLAND, that caters to the gay and transsexual community caught on fire early Monday morning, driving one of the customers out onto the 4th-floor window ledge where he waited for the arrival of the fire brigade. Unfortunately for Memeth J., a photographer for Blick newspaper got there before the firefighters did.
Now everybody in Switzerland knows what his butt looks like, but he tells Blick, “I hope nobody sees my face and that nobody in my family recognizes my (butt). They don’t know that I am gay.”
The entire “salon” was burned out and Memeth was hospitalized briefly for minor burns here and there.
GERMANY HAD ONE OF ITS WORLD-RENOWNED MULTI-VEHICLE accidents Friday morning on the freeway that connects Stuttgart and Munich. As the traffic was flowing near Augsburg, a patch of thick fog descended over an icy patch of roadway and the collisions began. When the fog lifted there were 21 trucks and 37 cars piled up in one heap and a total of 170 wrecked vehicles along a 1-kilometer stretch of the A8.
Welt.com
Seventeen people were injured, but none of them were very serious. One eyewitness described the scene as “absolute chaos” and the entire highway was shut down for hours as the mess was cleaned up.
The fire department set up R & R tents and the Red Cross transported hot drinks and food to provision the hundreds of travelers who were stranded in the wintry countryside.
Welt has the story and a 17-image photo gallery HERE.
Update: Another pileup in Thuringen Another multi-vehicle pileup occurred at 4am this morning near Gottingen when 42 cars and trucks started sliding in the icy weather and ended up in a tangled mess. About 80 to 100 people were in the vehicles and 20 of them were injured, 2 seriously. The cause was similar to the previous accident, sudden deterioration of road conditions during a winter storm.
A THREE-ALARM FIRE IN MAYWOOD, ILLINOIS, late Friday night was punctuated by the rescue of a boy about 9 years old who was alone in his apartment. The fire in the Chicago suburb started in the rear of the first floor of a 3-story commercial building that has apartments on the upper floors. The fire began around 11:30 pm and an automatic alarm notified the FD.
When the first units arrived they were told of the boy in one of the apartments and a woman not yet accounted for in another unit. A 2nd alarm was struck shortly after.
Firefighter Tony Morrone was part of the team searching the interior when he found an 8- or 9-year-old boy sleeping in a bedroom, Maywood Fire Chief Keith Dobberfuhl said.
“The boy was under the layer of smoke when [Morrone] found him,” Dobberfuhl said. “The boy was asleep face down. Morrone carried him through the smoke and brought him down the staircase. All the while, the kid was calm and just waking up. [The kid's] dad was waiting outside,” Dobberfuhl said. The father took himself and his son to stay at a neighbor’s house a block away, he said.
Morrone has been a firefighter with the Maywood Fire Department for 15 years, Dobberfuhl said.
The 3rd alarm was struck shortly after midnight and the fire was declared out at 4 am Saturday morning. During the operations part of the second floor collapsed onto the first floor, but the entire 3rd floor remained intact and the late-19th century building is believed to be repairable. The woman who was missing at first was later found to have been led out of the fire by another tenant.
Larry Shapiro photo
Chicagoland fire photographer Larry Shapiro has a 100-image photo gallery of his always-quality photographs HERE.
THE NIGERIAN NATIONAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY (NEMA) planned and staged a complex airplane crash-rescue at the Port Harcourt International Airport on Friday. Air Commodore Abayomi Bankole, director of search and rescue at NEMA, said the exercise was supposed to test the capability and capacity of the various response agencies in a simulated crash. He got exactly what he wished for when a plane carrying officials that was arriving for the exercise crashed while landing at the airfield.
The plane carrying 44 (or 47) passengers and five crewmen touched down on the runway, then skidded off into the brush. Everybody survived the crash, but 10 people suffered injuries, some seriously. The crash-rescue trucks and medical personnel were already suited up and ready for the drill, so they were able to get right on the wreck and effect the rescues.
Triage and treatment procedures were hampered however, because many of the plane’s passengers were already made up with various wounds for the planned drill. Fortunately there was no fire involved in the crash.
The fuselage of the Air Force plane was damaged “beyond recognition” and has just been left abandoned in the bush where it skidded to a halt in the mud.
A CONSTRUCTION CRANE COLLAPSED WEDNESDAY MORNING ONTO a scaffolding in the Saxony-Anhalt region of Germany. The accident buried and trapped about a dozen workers under the debris and in the mud flats below.
MDR
They were working on a 6-mile-long causeway for the ICE, the high-speed rail line, that is being built over a flood plain that has mud and standing water on it. It is not yet known why it happened, but the crane suddenly tipped over and crashed onto the work scaffold for the bridge which is about 40 ft. above the ground level. Altogether, about 1,000 tons of equipment and scaffolding were covering the trapped workers.
DPA
The area is inaccessible to wheeled vehicles, so the FD had to special-call a water rescue team to bring inflatable boats and a hovercraft to get access to the injured workers. According to the police, five workers were rescued with minor injuries while another six were trapped beneath the wreckage for some time before rescue services were able to dig them out. Most of them suffered serious but non-life threatening injuries.
MDR
MDR has a video report showing the collapse scene and rescue efforts HERE.
MDR’s print story is HERE.
A FAST-MOVING STORM CARRYING GALE-FORCE WINDS of 90 mph came out of the Atlantic Ocean Saturday that has led to more than 50 deaths, much flooding and structural damages.
The storm, named Xynthia, entered Portugal traveling northeast and raced across a tip of Spain, then across the Bay of Biscay and slammed into the west coast of France where it inflicted its heaviest damages. Then it moved across Belgium, northern Germany and into Denmark. The catastrophic storm created ancilliary damage to the southeast coastal areas of England, all of the Netherlands, and southern Sweden.
The storm surge caused heavy flooding along the French coast with many areas wrecked by the waters. As of Monday morning there were 51 known deaths and at least 30 more unaccounted for. After the storm passed, police and firefighters in boats went house-to-house and searched each of them. In some cases they found the occupants drowned inside.
France has deployed 9,240 firefighters from across the country to the disaster zone.
On Sunday France’s President Sarkozy took the helicopter tour over the coastal disaster zone. This video has some good views of some of the flooded area. The people in the orange jackets are fire / rescue people. The civilians at the end of the video are people who lost everything they owned to the flood waters:
The other countries weren’t as hard-hit. Portugal had one death, Spain 3, Germany 3 and one in Belgium. However, damage was still high in all countries both from flooding and inland trees falling.
Here are more views from France
Some scenes from Germany
Prepared by Laurence Delorme
Additional information provided by Christian Lewalter.
A VAUGHAN, ONTARIO (York Region) FIREFIGHTER HAS BEEN CHARGED with careless driving following a crash on February 2 that left a civilian dead.
Gianmarco Solimena, 30, was driving a Vaughan Fire and Rescue pumper to an emergencycall with his lights and siren on when he approached a green light at an off-ramp intersection. As he was about to enter the intersection, the light turned and a 54-yr.-old driver who had been waiting at the light pulled out into the path of the fire engine.
Vaughan firefighters work to extricate the 54-yr.-old
driver from his car. (CTV photo)
The impact caused the car to spin and strike a light pole leaving the car a tangled wreck with the driver trapped inside. The four firefighters were all slightly injured, but they immediately went to work extricating the driver. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.
CTV Toronto has the original story and a video report HERE.
Solimena was charged Thursday with one count of careless driving — a Highway Traffic Act offence. He will appear before the Provincial Offences Justice Court in Newmarket on March 29.
A WOMAN SITTING BEHIND THE STANDS AT FIREBIRD INTERNATIONAL RACEWAY in Chandler, Arizona, died Sunday following a freak accident on the drag strip. The race track was hosting the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) Arizona Nationals, a major circuit event.
The errant dragster a moment before the wheel came off.
(all photos from Roger Richards / CompetitionPlus.com)
During a race between two Top Fuel Dragster category cars, the left rear wheel came off one of the dragsters, sending the car into a flaming tumble down the track. The wheel started bouncing, hitting the barrier and then bouncing over the grandstand and landing on the woman who was sitting at a picnic table next to a motor home behind the stands.
She was immediately attended to by a Gila River Reservation ambulance and then transferred to a helicopter where she was flown to the hospital. She died shortly after.
ABC15 has this video report with additional information:
The NHRA is investigating the cause of the equipment failure, but has not determined what happened yet.
SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT MONDAY MORNING a chain-reaction crash involving a bus and two trucks killed at least 6 people and seriously injured more than 30 others. The accident happened on the outer ring highway just outside of Vienna, Austria, when a bus rear-ended a double-trailer truck which in turn rear-ended another tractor-trailer ahead of it.
BFK
The alarm was dispatched to the local Sittendorf and Sparbach fire stations at 00:06. On their arrival they were met with large numbers of injured people, some wandering and other laying bleeding. So the call went out for more assitance and a total of 60 firefighters were dispatched from the Brunn am Gebirge, Gaaden, Modling, and Perchtoldsdorf departments. At one point, four hydraulic rescue tools were operating at simultaneous extrications. All the FD’s are volunteer departments.
BFK
A triage zone was set up in the adjoining traffic lane and within an hour everybody had been freed and transported. Nobody on the bus was uninjured.
A 23-yr.-old Seattle burglar, who takes things too literally, attempted to enter a mansion via the chimney Friday afternoon while the owners were away. Unfortunately the young man wasn’t familiar with chimney things like, flue and damper.
KOMO-TV
Just as he neared the end of his descent, he became stuck as the chimney narrowed near the bottom and he was left dangling with his feet projecting into the firebox.
Police believe he was stuck there for at least 3 hours before neighbors heard his screams for help and called 9-1-1.
When the PD and firefighters entered the house, they found him with his feet hanging from the chimney. Using air chisels, the rescue squad dismantled the bottom of the chimney from inside to free the man who was soon dubbed the “Santa Claus burglar” by the homeowners.
KOMO-TV
Nothing was stolen, thanks to an alert chimney, but the man had to be taken to the hospital for minor injuries.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports: “Investigating officers determined that the 23-year-old male suspect had no connection to the residence and had no legal right to be there,” according to a Friday night police statement. “Officers are guarding the suspect at Harborview and will be booking the suspect into the King County Jail for investigation of burglary upon his release from the hospital, which is expected soon.”
AS DERANGED PILOT JOSEPH STACK was approaching the office building and taking aim on the 2nd-floor IRS offices, his landing gear grazed the top of a car that was driving nearby. Perhaps a foot or two lower and the plane might have tumbled and never reached the mid-rise building and destroyed it. Instead, it broke the car’s windshield and smashed out the sunroof without harming the driver.
NewsChannel8 Austin interviewed Dinesh Mallam and he told them:
He said he saw the plane coming at him and the wing nearly clipped his car.
“In a split second, it hit the ground floor of the building on the right side. The impact was so huge that my car was treading and totally out of control,” Mallam said. “I was trying to control my car. My windshield was broken and all the debris piling on my car. I could hear all the noises from the explosion. I blacked out for like two seconds.”
He said he regained composure and got control of the car. As soon as he could, he brought it to a stop, but Mallam said he couldn’t see from the thick black smoke surrounding him. He also said he almost wished he couldn’t hear.
One of the good stories to come from the plane crash is about the passing glazer. Robin Dehaven was driving his glass company’s truck to a job site when he saw the plane approaching the building. He told Fox News:
“I first assumed it was a toy plane someone was messing around with, because it was flying really low and kind of going back and forth, turning left and right.” He soon realized the “toy” was actually a small passenger plane; moments later, he saw black smoke billowing from the building.
“I immediately drove my truck over there, got the ladder off, went up to the side of the building and I saw people up on the second floor with their heads out the window for air because the room was filled with smoke,” Dehaven said.
Dehaven extended his ladder up to the stranded workers and tried to instruct them on how to secure it, but they were unable to. So, rather than have them climb down an unsecure ladder, he climbed up. “I climbed inside the broken-out window into the building with them,” said Dehaven.
Robin Dehaven (Binswanger Glass Co. photo)
Read his complete accounting of his actions to rescue the five trapped office workers HERE.
KXAN-TV Ch.36 has the video report on this story:
* * *
DESPITE THIER BELIEF YESTERDAY that the pilot was the only casualty, a second body has been found in the building. The remains of Vernon Hunter, 67, an IRS collections manager were found yesterday afternoon in the secondary search.
The Austin Statesman-American has the updated STORY.
KTBC-TV has the update video report on this discovery:
FOLLOWING MONDAY MORNING’S COLLISION of two passenger trains in Belgium (see yesterday’s Firegeezer video report HERE), the following disclosures and events have taken place.
* The death toll from the accident has been revised downward to 18 dead, 15 men and 3 women. It appears that this will be the final count.
* The driver of the train that passed the stop signal survived the crash but is in serious condition. After throwing on the emegency braking system, he started sounding the horn rapidly until the last moment when he then dove out the door of the cab. He is in the hospital but unable to be interviewed by the investigators due to his extensive injuries.
* Part of the accident investigation is focused on how and why the train passed the stop signal. The London Timesreports:
Mr Spiessens could not say whether the driver had missed a red signal in the snowy conditions, or whether the signal had been obscured or faulty. An inquiry is under way after the black box recorders of both trains were recovered.
There are also claims that automatic braking equipment had not been fitted to the smaller commuter train, which should have prevented it from passing a stop signal and colliding with the 12-carriage express.
Luc Lallemand, vice-chairman of Infabel, which manages the rail network, said that, if both trains had the automatic equipment “it could have been avoided.”
* Late Monday, a statement from Belgium’s national rail company SNCB and infrastructure operator Infrabel said the crash had been “lateral” and not head-on as previously reported.
“For reasons that are still unknown, the two trains collided laterally at points at the exit of Halle station on the way to Brussels,” the statement said.
lesoir
* A spontaneous strike by Belgian railway workers began Tuesday morning in protest of poor working conditions. BBC News reports:
Train workers were striking on Tuesday in protest at what they described as deteriorating working conditions, which they said could lead to accidents such as the one at Halle.
SNCB said the “spontaneous” strike was being widely followed and that there would be widespread disruption to train services in southern Belgium, or Wallonia, throughout Tuesday.
There is a 26-image photo gallery of aerial views HERE.
A 90+ image photo gallery (3 pages) HERE.
TWO CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, FIREFIGHTERS LITERALLY WENT into the flames in a dramatic rescue attempt of two infants Monday afternoon.
WTVC
When the units arrived on the scene there was fire coming from the windows of both floors of a 2-story apartment unit and reports from people outside of two infants still upstairs. Two firefighters immediately charged up the stairs and found them in a bedroom with a 7-month-old baby in a crib and a boy age 3 nearby on the floor. Snatching both of them, the FF’s dashed outside as the turnout coat of one of them caught on fire.
Unfortunately, the baby was already dead from smoke inhalation. The older boy was also burned and died a few hours later at the hospital. The babies’ mother had left them in the care of her 9-yr.-old autisitic son while she visited with a neighbor three doors away. Investigators are working to determine the cause and are also considering criminal charges against the mother.
This video report from WTVC-TV Ch. 9 includes some gripping home video showing the rescue and the FF coming out of the apartment with the baby tucked inside his running coat that is burning at the same time. Later in the video they show his colleagues using a handline to extinguish his burning coat:
The Chattanooga Times Free Press has the full story and additional video HERE.
FIREFIGHTERS IN AND AROUND BRUSSELLS, BELGIUM, are working a messy mass-casualty incident this morning following a head-on crash of two loaded commuter trains.
The accident happened near a station where one of the trains went through a stop signal, approached the other on the same track, and they collided at speed head-on without ever applying the brakes. The tumbling rail cars struck a third train on the next track that was stopped at the station causing further damage and injury.
The latest casualty count has 25 dead and more than 150 injured, but both totals are expected to continue to rise throughout the day as rescue and extrication operations are carried out. AFP is reporting that several surgeons are on the scene performing amputations on-site to free victims from the wreckage.
The two trains hit each other near the town of Halle, about nine miles southwest of Brussels.
The London Times has a recent report and a video HERE.
Firegeezer will be updating the report during the day after confirmed information becomes available.
NOTICE: Since this video report was posted we have learned that this incident occurred in 1995. The tv station was apparently running a reprise for some reason. But we’ll leave the video posted for now because it is interesting. Read the Comment from Brian for some good insight.
We’re sorry for any misunderstandings, but they began here.
AS INTERSTATE-10 APPROACHES MOBILE, ALABAMA, it traverses Mobile Bay on a causeway known locally as the Bayway. Early this morning (Monday), shortly before 7 am a fog bank drifted into the bay and blanketed the Bayway bringing visibility down to zero instantly.
As the rush-hour traffic was building up, the Bayway was getting congested when the fog rolled in. It didn’t take long for the chain-reaction accidents to start happening. Within a few minutes there were five separate pile-ups on both eastbound and westbound lanes involving 130 vehicles, including a Mobile FD fire engine.
WALA-TV
By the time it was over and the fog lifted enough for rescuers to find their way to all the wrecks, there was one person dead and several dozen injured. Packaging and transporting all those injured victims from an isolated location was a genuine challenge for the EMS and fire units.
WALA-TV Ch. 10 has a good, comprehensive video report on the entire incident that covered a 2-mile stretch of the causeway in each direction:
A EUCALYPTUS TREE IN SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA, GREW UP in just the right place along a roadway near the city’s famous amusement park. Wednesday afternoon a young man was driving along the street when he suddenly began having seizures. A witness who was driving a car just ahead of him noticed the car start swerving back and forth, then drive into and through the metal fencing along the sidewalk, ending up against the tree.
Santa Cruz Sentinel
The fence separates the sidewalk from a 50-ft. cliff that drops down to the San Lorenzo River, but the tree stopped the car from making the plunge. The witness, Mike Bethke tells the Santa Cruz Sentinel:
“I hear this horrendous crash. I look back and this car’s just sitting in the air,” Bethke said. “It was unbelievable.” Bethke and several others stopped to help the driver. The car’s engine was racing so they turned off the car and tried to calm the man, who was still having a seizure, Bethke said.
“This guy had to have a guardian angel because few feet either way he would have been down in the river,” Bethke added.
Santa Cruz FD Battalion Chief Matt McCaslin was with some units just across the river running some driver-training evolutions in a parking lot when the incident occurred and were able to make a rapid response to the emergency. The car’s driver was transported to the hospital.
Santa Cruz Sentinel
Read the complete story in the SentinelHERE and view the photo gallery of the wreck HERE.
Santa Cruz Fire Department WEBSITE.
A BUS IN ROUEN, FRANCE, CARRYING 34 SCHOOLCHILDREN and four adults, plus the driver, was destroyed when it was driven into a tunnel that was lower than the bus needed for clearance.
The wreck ripped the top off of the bus and brought down some of the brick lining in the tube. The children were ages 6 to10 and ten of them were injured, two of them seriously enough to be admitted to the hospital. One of the adults was also seriously injured and had to be extricated from the wreckage.
The bus driver said that he had taken to the underpass to avoid traveling through an intersection.
A total of about 80 firefighters were dispatched to the scene.
FARMINGTON, MINNESOTA, FIREFIGHTERS RESPONDED THURSDAY MORNING to a grain elevator for a man trapped in a corn silo. The elevator worker had fallen into the silo and was buried to his armpits with only one arm free. He was about 40 feet below the top of the silo.
ThisWeekLive.com
The regional high-angle team, the Dakota County Special Operations Team, responded and set up an operation from above. After first cutting a larger hole in the silo cover, they lowered firefighters down with plywood sections who then built a protective barricade around the trapped man.
Railroad traffic was halted during the operation so that there wouldn’t be any vibration that could cause further shifting of the corn. Later into the operation, they cut another hole in the side of the silo to allow product to spill out and lower the level after the man had been secured. After nearly eight hours of work, mostly by hand, he was brought topside and successfully brought to freedom.
KARE-TV has a good video report from the rescue scene:
A FIRE DEEMED “SUSPICIOUS” BROKE OUT in a Mississauga (Toronto area), Ontario, office building late Wednesday afternoon. The fire that started on the third floor of the 7-story building sent thick smoke to the upper floors and filled the fire towers with smoke, trapping more than 100 workers on the upper floors.
City News
While the fire was contained to a relatively small area, the people above were understandably stressed at not being able to exit while smoke was filling their offices. CityTV reports:
(Fire) crews managed to free more than 100 people who couldn’t initially get out due to heavy smoke.
“We were trapped. We went into the conference room and closed the door. But the smoke started to come into the conference room, so we were getting kind of nervous,” described office worker Gana Kran. Fire crews broke windows and cleared out a stairwell before leading the trapped workers down. Outside a triage centre had been set up and an air ambulance that had been dispatched sat waiting.
A couple of people suffered smoke inhalation but no one was seriously injured.
“To get a fire of that magnitude going when the building is fully occupied is indeed suspicious so we’re going to investigate, find out what happened,” Deputy Chief Greg Laing of Mississauga Fire told reporters. The fire marshal is looking at an office occupied by a local politician as the point of origin. When answering a knock on their door, one of the staff found the fire burning just outside in the hallway just before 5 pm.
CityTV has this video report:
The MFD had the fire out around 7 pm. Damage has been estimated at $200,000.
A FIRE BEGAN MONDAY AFTERNOON IN AN ABANDONED 5-STORY brownstone in Harlem, NYC. The building, however, was occupied by a collection of squatters and when the FDNY arrived on the scene there were two people trapped at windows on an upper floor.
NY Daily News photo
After quickly getting them out with a tower/ladder, interior crews found a woman on the 5th floor in cardiac arrest. After getting her out of the building and onto the sidewalk out front, rescusitation measures were taken and she was revived in the ambulance. She remains hospitalized in critical condition.
Photo via Rome.com
The New York Post filed this good video report from the fire scene:
Update #2, Thursday
The search for victims has been suspended at 7 am Thursday morning due to the instability of the adjoining buildings. Engineers and rescuers are concerned that they may have a partial collapse. Up until the discontinuation of the search there have been 9 bodies recovered, some of them heavily burned.
SEE THE EARLIER FIREGEEZER STORY ON THE APARTMENT BUILDING COLLAPSE IN LIEGE, BELGIUM, HERE.
Following the discovery of the 13-yr.-old girl still alive in the rubble, the firefighters recovered four bodies and the fire chief says that they believe that there could be as many as ten more bodies buried inside. As of Wednesday night they have recorded five deaths and 23 injured.
Earlier on Wednesday afternoon King Albert II arrived at the collapse scene to view the wreckage and in this brief video clip he meets with a group of firefighters:
This video indicates that the firefighters were able to detect the imminent collapse because you can see them withdrawing just before it falls in. (The collapse occurred about five hours after the explosion and fires.)
This video has an aerial view of the scene later in the morning:
See the earlier report on the collapse with photos and link to a photo gallery HERE along with the story.
IN THE TOWN OF STEIN-AT-TRAUN IN BAVARIA, Germany, a large chunk of rock broke away from a cliff face and landed on a house, destroying it and killing two residents.
The huge boulder broke loose from the top of a 50-ft. cliff during the dinner hour Monday evening and landed on the house while all four members of the family living there were in the same room. The father, 45, and daughter, 18, were killed while the mother, 40, and their 16-yr.-old son were rescued later by the Fire-Rescue department.
On arrival, the 200+ first-responders began searching for survivors and after several hours they were able to make voice contact with the pair. Eventually they were released and transported to a hospital. A geologist brought in for advice said that there was no immediate danger of any more rockfall, but he was unable to immediately explain why this event happened.
THE SITUATION IN HAITI HAS BEEN downgraded from “rescue” to a “recovery” operation and the USAR teams are gradually getting packed up and returning to their homes. Some video reports are starting to show up now from their localities documenting their return:
WAVY-TV Norfolk reports on Virginia Task Force 2:
WNYW-TV New York City interviews the commanders of New York Task Force 1:
The UK Press Association meets with returning members of the British team:
WHEN THE DISPATCH FOR A TRAIN vs. car collision was sent to the Huron, Ohio, fire department Wednesday night, Captain Kurt Schafer was at home with his monitor on and heard the call. The report was for a car that had been struck and was on fire next to the railroad crossing. Capt. Schafer lives not far from the location and he responded from home to try and help before the units arrived.
When he came on the scene he found a car well-involved in fire and two legs sticking out of a window. Then he noticed that the legs were kicking as if trying to crawl out of the vehicle. Schafer ran up to the car, grabbed the victim’s coat and pulled him out and away from the blazing vehicle……ironically a Chevy Blazer. The train was traveling 50 mph when it struck the car sending it tumbling over and down an embankment.
WJW-TV Ch. 8 Cleveland interviews Capt. Schafer as he relates his story:
The driver of the Blazer was found to have 3 times the legal limit of alcohol in his bloodstream and admitted to police that he had consumed about 25 drinks earlier that evening.
The Morning Journal has a good report on what happened along with a link to the 9-1-1 tape HERE.
ADDITIONAL USAR TASK FORCE TEAMS have been activated with some of them already in transit to the disaster area. The main airport at Port au Prince has been secured by the U. S. military, following the invitation and approval of the Haitian government, and necessary repairs have been made to allow for the landing of the jumbo air freighters that will be bringing in disaster supplies and equipment from around the world.
Here in the U. S. the following USAR’s have been added to the activation list following the deployment of Virginia Task Force 1, Florida Task Forces 1 and 2, and California Task Force 2:
Virginia Task Force 2
California Task Forces 5 and 7
Ohio Task Force 1
New York Task Force 1
Texas Task Force 1
Tennessee Task Force 1
WREG-TV has this report on the Tennesse unit from Memphis’ preparation:
KRIV-TV has this report on the Texas Task Force 1 from Houston having to wait for an available aircraft to transport them:
For the first time in its 25-yr. existence, the Fairfax County, Virginia, team has dispatched a second unit to supplement the initial force. WUSA-TV has this video report on the additional dispatch:
Several Canadian USAR teams are on standby awaiting clearance orders from the Canadian government.
AS DERANGED PILOT JOSEPH STACK was approaching the office building and taking aim on the 2nd-floor IRS offices, his landing gear grazed the top of a car that was driving nearby. Perhaps a foot or two lower and the plane might have tumbled and never reached the mid-rise building and destroyed it. Instead, it broke the car’s windshield and smashed out the sunroof without harming the driver.
DESPITE THIER BELIEF YESTERDAY that the pilot was the only casualty, a second body has been found in the building. The remains of Vernon Hunter, 67, an IRS collections manager were found yesterday afternoon in the secondary search.
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