Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 8, 1995 TAG: 9509080115
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CLAUDIA COATES ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: PITTSBURGH LENGTH: Long
The crash of USAir Flight 427 into a wooded hillside on Sept. 8, 1994, did more than extinguish 132 lives and destroy a plane. It broke the hearts of hundreds of people.
For victims' families and crash-site workers, peace of mind and even sanity were shattered.
A woman still avoids her family room, where she and her husband, killed in the crash, once lounged contentedly with their two children.
A minister who prayed with coroners' helpers at the crash site is still trying to recover from depression that led him to work longer and longer hours to block out memories of death.
And countless members of the community where the plane crashed now look up when a plane flies lower than usual, many of them mindful that a year after the disaster, the country's best aviation minds are still unable to say what caused it.
When Joanne Shortley wakes up in the morning, one foot occasionally still wanders to the other side of the bed, searching for her husband, Steven.
She then realizes anew that she is alone.
Steven Shortley, her husband of two decades, was on his way home to Pittsburgh from business in Chicago when Flight 427 crashed, killing everyone aboard.
``I still cry - I still miss him terribly - but it's not that gut-wrenching cry,'' Shortley says. In the past year, she has gone from wife and mother to widow and single parent.
``I zip up and button my own dresses, scratch my own back, program my own VCRs, hammer my own nails,'' she says. ``If my husband walked through that door, he'd say, `What the hell happened to you?' He'd probably admire me.''
She agonized over becoming one of the first plaintiffs to settle a lawsuit against USAir and Boeing Co., the maker of the 737 that plummeted inexplicably from the sky.
``I did not want to prolong this. I did not want to become a wealthy person because my husband died.'' She pours her feelings out in a diary and to members of a support group for victims' families.
Some things sharpen the pain, such as seeing happy couples or Shortley's parents. She cannot abide the family room and only now can sit in ``his'' seat on the sun porch.
New traditions honor his memory.
His wedding ring, found amid the wreckage, hangs on a chain around her neck. The impact of the crash flattened the ring into an oval.
She keeps an unwashed towel - the last towel her husband used - on a bathroom rack.
Unlike many counselors at the Flight 427 crash site, the Rev. Don Hurray was not protected from the horror of seeing 132 shattered bodies.
He witnessed the worst, just as the workers did. But he paid a high price.
``I thought I was strong and could handle everything, but I couldn't,'' says Hurray, pastor of the Ohio United Presbyterian Church in Aliquippa.
He would have liked to back out. Instead, he stayed for a week.
``The workers were just going crazy,'' he recalls. ``I could see why they wanted me to be up there. Without God, you can see there's no hope, and we desperately need that hope.''
He prayed with searchers or stood among them, offering silent prayers.
In the months afterward, he began to recognize what a weight the ordeal had placed on his shoulders. In February, depression struck. His main symptom was anger, at everything and nothing.
``He withdrew from our family. He wouldn't talk about anything, which is not like him. He worked all the time. ... He was just always at the church, just running, doing something day and night so he wouldn't have to think,'' says his wife, Lauren.
When she linked his troubles to the crash, she was surprised when he immediately agreed.
``Everything was just, `What's the use?' - just that horrible black feeling,'' Hurray says.
``I explained the confusion that really there were so many different groups up there, and nobody at the beginning really knew what they were doing and they were learning along the way, and the tremendous strain of seeing things that people shouldn't really have to see,'' he says.
Some are using the crash as an inspiration.
A 200-member alliance of relatives of Flight 427 passengers is trying to change the way airlines deal with disasters. John Kretz, the group's executive director, complained to Transportation Secretary Federico Pena that USAir had mishandled personal issues surrounding the crash.
The group says many relatives had to wait for hours before receiving confirmation - sometimes delivered rudely - that their loved one was aboard the plane; that victims' rings, watches, wallets and other belongings sometimes were discarded; that remains were buried in a mass plot without the families' consent.
``We've gotten the attention of the secretary of transportation, and I'd say that's pretty good,'' says Kretz, whose wife was killed in the crash.
USAir says notification was delayed in some cases because it took the airline a long time to compile an accurate list of victims; that many belongings were in too poor condition to return to relatives; and that airline officials did not reveal the extent of unidentified remains buried because they thought it would upset relatives.
Three Virginia residents died in the crash of Flight 427: David Lamanca, 27, of Salem; De Worrell, 54, of Lexington; and Richard V. Talbot, 61, of Blacksburg.
by CNB