THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, July 19, 1996 TAG: 9607190614
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A4 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CHARLENE CASON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 80 lines
A Portsmouth-based Coast Guard cutter and two C-130 Hercules planes from the Elizabeth City Coast Guard Air Station crisscrossed the Atlantic off Long Island, N.Y., Thursday, searching for victims and wreckage from TWA Flight 800.
In addition, local Navy and Army dive units were poised late Thursday to travel to the debris-strewn waters where 230 passengers and crew members are believed to have perished aboard the Paris-bound jet Wednesday night.
More than 500 Coast Guard men and women have worked around the clock since late Wednesday to recover passengers' bodies and gather the mangled chunks of the Boeing 747-100, which reportedly exploded in a fireball shortly after taking off from New York's Kennedy International Airport.
The 270-foot cutter Harriet Lane, which was on routine patrol near where the airliner went down, acted as the on-site coordinating vessel for early rescue attempts.
Its crew worked through the night Wednesday and all day Thursday recovering bodies from fuel-tainted water several miles off Moriches Inlet, on Long Island's south-central coast.
Assisting the Harriet Lane were the Vigorous, another cutter, and the patrol boat Point Franklin, both home-ported in Cape May, N.J.
The cutters are part of the Coast Guard's 5th District, headquartered in Portsmouth.
The two C-130 Hercules search-and-rescue planes from Elizabeth City, N.C., stayed in the air almost continuously, landing only briefly to refuel.
The local ships and planes were part of a massive Coast Guard response to the crash: All told, 10 cutters, 10 small boats, four helicopters and the two Hercules aircraft scoured more than 240 square miles of the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island during the day.
Although no signs of life had been found among the plane's passengers and crew by late Thursday - and the prospects for such a discovery dwindled by the hour - a Coast Guard spokesman at the scene said the service's efforts were still aimed at finding survivors.
``We're still making a concentrated effort in our search for survivors,'' Lt. Chris Zenden said, adding that rescue teams eventually would shift their emphasis to recovering wreckage and personal effects.
Bodies were ferried on Coast Guard boats to the coast, then taken to a nearby Air National Guard hangar. Police in surrounding Suffolk County were charged with coordinating the disposition of remains, said Petty Officer 2nd Class Gary Rives, a Coast Guard spokesman.
Large pieces of recovered wreckage were transferred to the 225-foot buoy tender Juniper, home-ported in Newport, R.I.
Meanwhile, Mobile Diving and Salvage Detachment 2, based at Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base, spent nearly six hours Thursday packing equipment - boats, sonar scanning devices, a recompression chamber and communication supplies - in readiness for deployment to the crash site.
If dispatched there, the 15-member unit would be accompanied by six members of Explosive Ordnance Disposal Detachment Unit 2 - also from Little Creek - and four soldiers from the Army's EOD Mobile Unit 10 at Fort Story in Virginia Beach.
``My major concerns are the depth of the water'' and the means the team might use to reach the diving area, said Chief Warrant Officer 2 George Primavera, operations officer and chief diving officer of Little Creek's salvage unit.
Wreckage and the bodies of about half of the victims are believed to be resting on the ocean floor, at an estimated depth of 115 feet.
``The depth of the water determines the dive system and what equipment we take with us,'' Primavera said.
Local divers should get some guidance in what to take with them, if they deploy, from a team of Navy experts who were called to the crash site from Washington, around noon Thursday.
Capt. Raymond McCord, superintendent of the Naval Sea Systems' salvage and diving unit, headed the team, which went to assist the National Transportation Safety Board in early efforts to determine which divers and equipment would be needed to complete the search for victims' bodies and plane wreckage. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
VICKI CRONIS/The Virginian-Pilot
Chief Warrant Officer 2 George Primavera, of a diving and salvage
unit stationed at Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base, is on standby
with his crew to help off Long Island.
KEYWORDS: U.S. COAST GUARD ACCIDENT PLANE
FATALITIES TWA FLIGHT 800 by CNB