Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: My name is Bill Thomas.
Speaker 3: I'm a writer, consulting, producer, and now podcaster. I am
now trying to use my experience as the brother of
a murder victim to help other victims of violent crime.
Speaker 2: I'm working on a book on the unsolved Colonial.
Speaker 3: Parkway murders, and I'm the co administrator of the Colonial
Parkway Murders Facebook group together with Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 4: My name is Kristin Dilly. I'm a writer, a researcher,
a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the
social media manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway
Murders Facebook page with my partner in crime, Bill Thomas.
Speaker 5: Welcome to Mind Ever Murder.
Speaker 6: I'm Kristin Dilly and I'm Bill Thomas.
Speaker 7: We're joined today by a return guest and friend of
the pod, author Bruce Goldfarb, here to talk to us
about his new book The Worst Day, a plane Crash,
a train wreck, and Remarkable Acts of heroism in Washington,
d See.
Speaker 5: Bruce, thank you for joining us.
Speaker 6: Oh, thank you for having me. It's such a really
looking forward to us. It's going to be fun. Oh,
we think so too.
Speaker 7: You've been wonderful in the past, and we were looking
forward to a great conversation today.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 6: Thanks for having me so.
Speaker 7: The last time we had you on the pod, you
chatted with us about your book eighteen Tiny Deaths, which
explored the life of forensic pioneer Francis Plesner Lee. And
then we had the equal pleasure of appearing with you
at the Buy the Book mini con at the Montclair
Public Library outside of Washington, d C.
Speaker 5: This past January, at.
Speaker 7: Which point you told us you were working on this
fascinating book and Bill and I were just riveted by
this concept because I had not heard of it, and
Bill had you either.
Speaker 5: Had you heard about the concept behind this book.
Speaker 3: I knew about the crash of Air Florida Flight ninety
and I remember watching it on the news and it
was just such a shocking and horrifying event. I didn't
realize until Bruce started walking us through through it that
there was a subway accident at the same time. And
you couldn't make this stuff up, Bruce, she would almost
be writing fiction. But this is all based on a
true story. This is you laying out what happened that day.
Speaker 6: In January, I as well remember that video, and that's
what got this whole thing going back in nineteen eighty
two watching the television and that rescue video was absolutely breathtaking,
absolutely stunning. And over the years learned more and more
about that day, and it just got more and more incredible,
and I nobody ever wrote the book, so I had to.
Speaker 3: I'm amazed no one's ever written a book about this.
Do you know if anybody ever took a shot at
it or anything, or was this your idea and you
ran with it? Nears I knows why idead. No, there's
never been a book. I don't think there's even been
a book written about Flight ninety. There were several the
Flight ninety crash itself. There was a docu drama made
for television movie, not a docu drama. There was a
major for television movie I think they came out in
nineteen eighty four, which was really pokey, not terribly accurate,
And there were some I think BBC one of the
channels National Geographic. There have been some reenactments, but it's
all focused on the plane crash and the rescue and
that and not about the entire day. I can really
safely say no, nobody's ever written about that day. But
I'm pretty sure nobody's written about the crash yourself. I
don't recall encountering a book about that crash. And this
obviously was a very intensive period of research and putting
all this together. How long were we working on the
worst day. This had been on my mind, honestly for
years and years, but I really started in earnest seriously
in twenty nineteen, after I finished eighteen Tiny Dice.
Speaker 6: It was me my next book. I guess it would
like twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen thereabouts. I knew that in
order to do the book, that the book could not
be done if I didn't have cooperation from certain people
I had to have. I needed to speak with a
survivor of the crash and certain people. The first person
I actually reached out to is Joe Styley, who was
one of the survivors, and I first talked with him,
And it was right around twenty nineteen or so, and
I started doing some things, getting in touch with the
retired firefighters. And then when things changed at my place
of employment at the Medical Examiner's Office, doctor Fowler left,
I set this project aside and just literally sat down
and knocked out OCMME. And then so when that came out,
I returned back to this. So it's been really five years,
but the most of it was concentrated in the past
two or three years.
Speaker 7: So before we get too terribly much further into it,
there will doubtless be people who won't remember this crash
or just might not be familiar with it at all.
Start by telling us about what happened to Air Florida
Flight ninety in January of nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 6: January thirteenth, nineteen eighty two, the country was in the
grips of a really brutal historic winter storm, record low temperatures,
The Potomac River had frozen over, there was snow dumped
on huge parts of the country, and at four in
the afternoon, Air Florida ninety headed towards Tampa with a
stop and no I'm sorry, going to Fort Lauderdale with
a stop in Tampa and took off from what was
then called National Airport and crashed into the fourteenth Street bridge,
which was at the time loaded with rush hour traffic.
Government had released employees early that day, and so the
streets were absolutely clogged with traffic. The city was gridlocked,
and the plane struck seven vehicles killed, several people, broke apart,
plunged through the ice into the Potomac River, and incredibly,
six people survived that crash. They were stuck out in
the middle of Potomac, stranded, separated from shore by one
hundred feet of thick ice. There was no way of
getting to them, and a park Police helicopter undertook this
mission in literally white out conditions, beyond the outside of
the guidelines for safe flight, and undertook this rescue mission
and plucked five of them from water.
Speaker 2: And as at the moment.
Speaker 6: When that rescue was going on, that's when the state
of the art subway system had its first fatal derailment.
So first responders they were faced with two major disasters
almost simultaneously. During a snowstorm that in a grid laxity,
and they had to push cars out of the way,
They had to drive across the White House and across
the mall. It was just absolute madness. The book is
about that day, that entire day, and it structured very
much like a mega disaster movie, because that's what it
seemed like to me. It was just an unbelievable, over
the top collection of circumstances that were just unimaginable. How
is it, Starting with flight ninety, how is it that
this airplane fails to gain altitude, never really made it
very high into the air. From things I've read, what
caused that? There are a number of errors. The crew,
the pilot and co pilot for one thing, that weren't
terribly experienced with that aircraft, and they weren't very experienced
flying in snow. They were both based in Florida, and
they made a number of really serious errors. There was
I read I follow a YouTube channel, so he calls
himself Hoover and it's called the Pilot Debrief. Yeah, I
follow him too. Yeah, he's really terrific. But he always
talks about the holes in the Swiss cheese lining up. Yeah,
and that's when something bad happens, when it's not just
one thing. But that was absolutely the case with Flight ninety.
With that, there was a series of error after aeror
planes that are supposed to be de iced in the
wintertime with at the ling GLYI call solution, which was
not at the right concentration. That wasn't done right, it
was done too far in advance of the takeoff. They
sat there on the runway after getting de iceed for
forty to fifty minutes. No accumulated. Critically. When they were
powering up the plane, they left off a There is
a engine heater. There is a heater in front of
the engines. There's this little tube called a pedo tube.
I hope I'm pronouncing that RaiSat or pito. They measure
the engine and thrush by measuring the pressure before and
in front, in the front of and behind the engine,
and the prints some pressure, they could tell them much
thrush that is being produced. And a piece of ice
had blocked one of these tubes.
Speaker 2: Oh god.
Speaker 6: So it caused a discrepancy in the power between the
two engines, and so they thought that their engine was
at full power for takeoff, but they were really only
at eighty percent.
Speaker 2: And so that was one thing.
Speaker 6: And then there was ice on the wings of the
plane itself, which interferes with lyft. It was a combination
of not going fast enough, the lift on the wings
was compromised, and it was really just doomed before they
even left the ground.
Speaker 3: One of the things I've read over the years regarding
de icing is that there's something about when snow and
ice accumulates, which is obviously typically on the top of
the wing while they're a stationary that lack of a
smooth surface interferes with lift, so it doesn't cause it
to lift up into the sky in the way that
we would expect. This forty five minute gap between the
de icing and the actual takeoff. Was that just as
a result of traffic on the ground waiting to be
cleared for takeoff.
Speaker 6: Yes, because the airport had been closed and so there
is a backlog of flights of departures. So they were
in line during this blizzard. So snow is still coming
down quite heavily, and so they could have turned back
and gone back to be de iced again, but then
they'd have to go loose their place in line and
be at the end, and they would just delay their
departure even further. So they took a risk, they gambled,
and they lost.
Speaker 7: Another part of the story here is the actual airport
at Solf National Airport.
Speaker 5: It's very busy.
Speaker 7: It also has a very complex airspace that's filled with
commercial and military flights. And of course we saw this
in January about four days after we talk to you
with the flight American Airlines Flight fifty three forty two,
which went down in the Potomac after it collided with
a black Hawk helicopter which was on an approach to National.
Before we get into talking about the actual crash and
the rescue on the ice, can you talk to us
about National Airport and why it's such a complicated place
to be taking off from and landing.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 6: It's a for one, it's a very small air really
surprisingly very small, and it's located very conveniently to downtown Washington.
Speaker 2: The metro goes right to it.
Speaker 6: It's very convenient to get to members of Congress, the
Supreme Court, they have their owners or a parking spots.
It's so very convenient versus Dulles, which is way out
in the suburbs and takes an hour or more just
to get to it, or BWI. It's the same thing,
the same distance away. So it's really favored, particularly by
people who are doing business with folks in Washington. It's
one of the smallest one and it's also surprisingly one
of the busiest in the country. They have one main runway,
this one way nineteen. It's the busiest and shortest of
any runway in the country right that over the course
of a day they have eight hundred or so flights
taking off or landing, which is about once every sixty
seconds through most of the day. It's just insanely busy,
and it's located in a very restricted area. There is
restricted airspace that's over a lot of Washington, over the
White House in the Capitol, and so what they have
to do is as soon as you leave.
Speaker 2: I don't know if you ever.
Speaker 6: Departed from National Airport, but it's like a roller coaster.
You followed the Potomac Inumiditia bank to the left, and
you're doing these left and right banks following the river upstream,
and that's done to limit the noise in the suburbs.
It's a very densely populated area, so they follow right
over the middle of the river. And it's just a
very unique airport with its factors that you just don't
face the other places. I'm not crazy about it. For years,
when I worked for ASKAP, the songwriters Organization, we would
fly back and forth from LaGuardia, which is another old,
very small airport with extremely short runways, and National, which
is the same kind of terable design. It was okay
when it was built, probably in the twenties or something.
With modern jet aircraft, and as you said, as many
as eight hundred flights per day. The whole thing is crazy.
Speaker 3: I know they've made noises about shutting it down, but
I don't think that's ever going to happen, do you no.
Speaker 6: And it just came up again after the flight fifty
three or forty two in January. Every few years there'll
be this talk about maybe we should do something about
it National or all. That would really take an Act
of Congress, and I really don't see that happening because
Congress loves the airport. I actually I like flying out
of it. I've bwi Is closer, but I have flown
out of National and it really is very convenient. It's
great to get to and you have your carry on
and you're good to go.
Speaker 7: But yeah, one of the main differences between fifty three
forty two that happened in January of this year and
then flight ninety is Flight ninety actually had survivors. I
know you're not an expert on aviation, that you're getting
pretty close to being one. She speculate maybe as to
why there may have been survivors in flight ninety, but
not in fifty three forty two.
Speaker 6: Well, fifty three forty two was a midair collision that
they dropped from an altitude into the water, which is
something in addition to the collusion from the impact then
you're dropping to the ground. Where Flight ninety basically because
it hit the vehicles before going into the water, the
tail section snapped off, and really it was the tumbling
action of that piece of fuselage over the vehicles dissipated
just enough energy so that when it smacked into the
water they weren't killed. But there are other similarities too
in that flight nine in January thirteenth and eighty two.
First of all, it must be pointed out that crashes
at Nashville Airport are very rare, but there was the
before nineteen eighty two. The one before that was I
believe what nineteen forty seven. There was thirty three years
and fin out over a long time, that's right. And
then from the one in January was the first commercial
aviation crash at National since nineteen eighty two. It's a
very long stretch of time between these things. In January,
the fireboat was how to commission they put it back
in commission after January's now back in service. Just like
in nineteen eighty two, the fireboat was not available for
any sort of rescue. So even if there had been people,
had people survived, they would have been in the same
situation where they're stuck out in the middle of the
water with no way to get to them. How did
flight ninety move on to your radar? Initially in nineteen
eighty two, I was an empty I had been a firefighter.
I left the fire department, and I was in nursing school,
and I really nursing school. I had already said it
in December of nineteen eighty one that I was done
with it and was going to move to Baltimore. But
in January watched this video. I watched the evening news.
I know exactly where I was at the time, watching
it over the bar at the Jefferson Square. It was
just absolutely stunning. It just I had participated in disaster
drills and exercises and these things before, so I had
some I had been in the field, so I knew
that there's a sense of there's a lot of coordination
and communication. There's things going on that you don't see.
It just absolutely fascinated me. For one thing, in eighty two,
the whole twenty four hour news cycle was still very new,
seeing we started in nineteen eighty so as near as
I know, this is just about the first breaking news
that was almost broadcast in real time. And so when
Frank Reynolds went on the air on that ABC National,
the people were still in the water. They hadn't there
still the rescue is still going on, and it had
this immediacy to it that I had never experienced before.
But it just impressed me a lot, and it's been
on my mind ever since. And we're just interested in
what was the chain of events in terms of how
did that call get to the nine one one center
and the people dispatched, and who was the first one
to initially call it in and these sorts of things
that I was always wondered about and had the opportunity
to find out about.
Speaker 7: So as somebody who took EMT courses, you said that
you've done disaster drills, what are the main concerns that
first responders have to think about during a mass casualty
event like a plane crash? Then?
Speaker 5: Or now let's start with then, and then, like, how
is it different now.
Speaker 6: It's very different now because it's okay, because it's a
bit more organized, and now they do a there's a
framework for it. Seeing command. Back in eighty two, you
basically had all these different jurisdictions. There was no cross communication.
I believe there is something like nineteen different agencies involved
at its peak with using nine different radio frequencies, and
they couldn't communicate with each other, which is a big issue.
So it's difficult what you need, where you needed, and
who's needed and these how you have to deploy what
you need where it's needed. So that was very chaotic.
It's the whole thing from beginning to end was chaotic.
I wanted to call the book cluster. No, we can't
do that. That's what it was. But now today they
do have those command sing management. There's a person who
just doesig need, who's in charge. You don't just deploy
all your resources to the scene. You wait to find
out what you need, so you don't have this whole
congregation and making things worse. Today they don't. There's just
an't the communication problems that there are. Then we all
have cell phones and so the usue of interoperatability is
not the problem that it is. It's not the problem
now that it was.
Speaker 3: Then how did you manage to get a hold of
the survivors? You only have what six people that survived
the impact? You knew who they were, But then in
reaching out to them, are they open to talking about it?
Do they not want to revisit this horrific event?
Speaker 6: I used. I tracked down dozens of first hand participants.
I used every trick that I have in my book.
Joe's Stoley was the first, and I actually reached Joe
through Facebook.
Speaker 2: I saw that he was.
Speaker 6: Active, reached out to him and he responded, and we'd
started out that way, and then went to email. I
was spoke in the phone and various other ways, but
I started out through Facebook. But it was really difficult.
That wasn't Joe wasn't the most difficult one. Actually, I
had to find somebody who was riding a subway car
forty three years ago. Oh yeah, so I had to
have somebody who was on that car. And interestingly, among
the sources that I had to work with, there was
an investigation by a Senate committee and by a House committee.
The House report is about thirteen hundred pages buried In
the appendix of this House report, there are documents from
the Washington d C. Fire Department, including a log of
all the equipment that was deployed and they went only went.
They also included a list of every person who was
transported by the fire Department that day. The survivors from
like ninety all went to National Orthopedic Hospital in Arlington,
but all the other people from the metro from the bridge.
The fire department supplied their name, the residential address, and
their date of birth. That included the phone number, but
it gave you a lot as a starting polic Yes,
so I knew where these people lived forty some odd
years ago. I went down the list. Some of them
had common names. It's really difficult to track down to
John Smith. But I did find Ruby May Thomas, my cousin.
She was wonderful Ruby, and we played telephone tag back
and forth. I even went door to door. I spent
some time in driving around Washington to the last known
progresses of these people, leaving notes and knocking the neighbor's
doors and just doing footwork. But I got a hold
of Rubymate Thomas and I asked her, as is this
Ruby May Thomas she says yes, and I said, we're
writing in the subway car that derailed in January thirteenth,
nineteen eighty two. Yeah, of course, And like she's been
waiting for somebody to ask her, and she just tell
me about it there to day and all that, and
she was just absolutely terrific. That was the trickiest one
who was getting a hold of Roobymates Thomas.
Speaker 2: She was the only one.
Speaker 6: It was heartbreaking reading obituary after bituary after bituary or something.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and I just missed him by a few years
or something like that. It was a race against time
to get this completed while people are still around.
Speaker 3: Because here we are forty years later, and some of
these people would have passed on due to natural causes
and other things, gene.
Speaker 6: Windsor the flight rescue a technician, the paramedic. I wish
he just died. I think as a maybe it was
twenty two or twenty three, just died just a few
years ago. I really would have liked to talk with him,
and he just passed away. And but they are Joe
Styley is getting really old. He's getting out of ears.
I think he's eighty four or eighty five, now, and
he's not doing well. Some of these folks are getting
pretty old. You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be
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Speaker 7: Of the survivors that you talked to, how many of
them were obviously everybody who survived something like this would
be impacted by it in some way. How many of
them really had a lot of processing to do, And
how many people were permanently impacted by it, either through
injuries or just through a phobia of flying. Maybe I
wouldn't want to get back on an airplane if I
survived an airplane crash.
Speaker 6: They all experienced and suffered experiences both physical and emotional
the rest of their lives, and they processed it in
different ways. Bert Hamilton got religious, the flight attendant Donna.
I'm liking in the names now, but they turned to religion.
The one person I could not bring myself to track
down Priscilla Toado, who lost her husband and baby in
the flight, and I know had never recovered from it
and had been stopped with the DUI and the anniversary
of it. She still feels it very deeply, and I
couldn't bring myself to tell me about the worst day
of your life and all the details of I just couldn't.
I didn't think it would add that much.
Speaker 2: What do you want to know?
Speaker 6: So I didn't do that, especially since you had other
sources and you knew that was going to be an
extremely painful conversation for her and probably even for you. Yeah,
it would have been a very difficult one, and particularly
in her case. It was Actually her father, Burne Keefer,
was a newsman in Florida, and he actually, on the
anniversary of the crash, wrote a five part series about
it and included a lot of information about Priscilla. And
he really liked his son in law, Jose Toronto, and
but he did he wrote quite a bit about the
crash in her life.
Speaker 7: Was this a difficult project for you to work on?
Just on an emotional level? It's intense, really heavy subject matter.
Speaker 6: It was intense, And I tell you, at one point
I was having ice dreams. Wow, like a favorite dream.
But there is about a week or so where night
after night, I was dreaming that I was stuck in
the middle of the Potomac and I'm in this ice water. Wow,
Because I remember writing about this experience, and it's really intense,
really intense that went on for about a week, and
there is that this was the most complicated, difficult project
I'd ever undertaken, really just in terms of the process
involved in bringing it together, the subject matter itself. Yeah,
because there's a traf parts of it are upsetting and
their biggraphic. But have to be honest about the subject
without being gratuitous. It's a fine line to walk, and
I hope that it treats people respectfully. And yeah, it
was difficult. Point people that.
Speaker 3: Were involved in this thing, both survivors and first responders
that ever expressed interest in reading the worst day when
your manuscript was completed. When the book came out.
Speaker 6: All of them really, oh my gosh, The Firefighter has
been great. I've heard from the whole bunch of people
they read it, who were in the book, and they
thanked me for bringing the story to light and recognizing
people who were involved in all these ways. And one
thing we hadn't mentioned is Lenny Scotnick, and he became
a celebrity. I remember this, but please tell a story, Yeah,
tell us about him. Lenny was a twenty eight year
old clerk in the Congressional Budget Office, who was there
at the riverside, And when Priscilla Toado was floundering in
the ice water, she was just about was so close
to that she was just about done for. And he
took off his boots and leapt into the water. And
do remember that, just took a flying dive into the water.
And like that, he instantly became a celebrity. Ronald Reagan
and by the moves of the City of the Union
address a couple of weeks later, there's all this overnight
people are talking about Stutts justly be an honest hero
and all these things, and he just became a huge celebrity.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: But there the thing was that there were if you
look at the video, there were dozens of people who
were there at the riverside.
Speaker 2: People.
Speaker 6: He was not the only one who got in the water.
He did a great thing, He did a great dive,
but there were other people who got in the water too,
and there was also bunch of people who were involved.
And we talked about this, the chains and the link
of survival. All these people were there. There was a
literal chain outter Roger olling in the water. But there
was a metaphorical chain, all these and they all deserve
some credit to I would like to think that if
I'm going out my day and suddenly faced with a
life in the situation, that I would take action, I hope.
And then you think about ice water, Really, are you
going to go jump an ice water?
Speaker 2: Too? But I think so, I hope so. But I
don't know. I've never been tested like that.
Speaker 6: People faced the challenge and there rose up to it,
and they came together from all walks of life, came
together for this one purpose. And that just really impressed
me and restored my faith in humanity. That there is
the sense that we are humans, we are in this together,
that we are in a society, and that we do
for one another, which I think is really It warms
me a bit to think about that, and I wish
we had more of that spirit today. That's a whole
different Subjody.
Speaker 7: Are there any stories from that day that you wanted
to be able to tell but you couldn't, either because
of lack of access or lack of information, or some combination.
Speaker 6: Of the two. I really wanted to know much more
about the metro crash. It was a really difficult part.
I did not get any cooperation from the Metro authority
the wash really why because they were found at fault.
I would imagine they had to be a part of it.
And they have a safety record that's persistently they have
persistent safety problems. So they just still want to talk
about track safety and all these things and dig up
all these but no. I tried several times, several different avenues.
They absolutely didn't want to cooperate.
Speaker 2: That was tough.
Speaker 3: What was the cause of the derailment? Here we are
focusing on flight ninety and the airplane crash. What happened
to cause a metro car to crash like that? They
have two subway tunnels.
Speaker 6: One goes in one direction and the other goes in
the other direction like a street, and then they have
a crossover so that they can move a track. There
are two separate tunnels, and then there's an area where
they open up so you can cross over the tracks.
So a train had mistake, they crushed over into the
wrong track. It only got a couple of subway cars
on the wrong track. They stopped the train and then
they reversed it. And that's when the problem happened. Because
one of the last there's the column trucks. There's two
sets of wheels in front and two sets of wheels
in the back. The one of the wheels at the
very end of the car came off the track. It derailed,
and so the front of the car because the switch
was defective. One set of wheels on the train was
on one set of tracks and the other set was
on the second set of tracks. And so when the
train backed up, it hit that end point where the
tunnel separated into two, which is basically a column when
you look at it on the edge, and it was
yanked back, forced back onto that column. So this concrete
just pushed its way into a subway car that was
packed to what they called crush capacity. It was jammed
shoulder to shoulder, so all the twisted metal just pushed
around and jammed together. It crushed people. It killed three
people instantly. There is twenty six people injured. And to
respond to that, which is in itself, would be a
major disaster. You need breathing equipment, year, you need heavy
metal cutting equipment, you need all this rescue equipment that's
already been deployed at the fourteenth Street bridge for the
plane crash. So they just it was the busiest day
in the history of the fire Department to the Washington
Fire Department up until nine to eleven. But that's basically
what happened with the subway.
Speaker 7: There is so much here. I would say it's a
great testament to your skill as a writer, Bruce, that
it reads like a disaster movie start to finish. I
could see somebody turning this into a movie. So I
am curious. Has anybody optioned this yet?
Speaker 6: Not yet. It just came out.
Speaker 2: I'm open.
Speaker 6: I'm entertaining anything, but I'll tell you. While I was
working on this, I binged on all the big seventies
disaster movies. I watched The Towering Front, ern Infernow, the Airport, Gosh, Cavlan.
There's so many of them to get that sense of
the timing and how it's structured in the timing and everything.
But it's very intentionally modeled after a mega disaster movie.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I'm really hoping that at some point or another
you're going to get a phone call from Michael Bay saying.
Speaker 2: That he was nice.
Speaker 6: That would be nice.
Speaker 5: It would be so cool.
Speaker 6: But it's great. It's good, just good to have this
in writing. A lot of people like Bill, they remember
a bit about it, they remember it was this big,
dramatic thing, but they don't know the whole none, nearly
all of it that was going on. So there there's
a population of people like that, like our age, who
do remember that, but they don't know the whole story.
And then there's everybody else who just here's about this
and they go, oh my god, this is incredible.
Speaker 7: And yeah, I was a year old when this happened,
so I would not have remembered like at all and
said it and I was like, what do you mean
an airplane hit the bridge in DC and fell into Potomac.
Speaker 5: What are you talking about? You told me the story,
and I was hooked and it was like, oh my god,
this is insane.
Speaker 3: And even though I remembered the airplane crash, I didn't
realize until we were preparing for this interview that your
book also then tells the story of the derailment, which
is essentially simultaneous. I didn't know that, and I don't
think most people knew that. No that had it not
been for Airport to the Plate ninety, that would have
been the lead story in the national news in Oh. Absolutely,
it would have been a huge story. Yeah, but actually
that got very little coverage because of this other thing
that happened in the amazing rescue.
Speaker 7: I really like the fact that you were able to
shed light on the response responsibilities and response time for
the first responders to people who were supposed to get
there and to help save lives and everything else. I
know you spent a lot of time researching the WAYDCPD,
the NTSB and other agencies responded.
Speaker 5: To the Flight ninety crash.
Speaker 7: Was there any thing in all of your research and
investigating that kind of surprised you about the way that
they responded to these disasters?
Speaker 6: There were things that surprised me. There were surprises. One
thing I found in going through this when you're doing
with memories, and you're doing with memories that old, that dramatic.
Speaker 2: Of that old.
Speaker 6: When I talked to Joe Styley, first thing he said
to me is.
Speaker 2: I'm very old. I went through a very dramatic experience.
Speaker 6: I've read everything that's been written about this, I've seen everything,
and I get confused. I'm not really sure. At this point,
he warned me that he's a poor historian because his recollection.
I'm not really sure what's first in experience what somebody
said to him what he read. I really appreciate that honesty.
But in terms of surprises, in the course of doing
this work, I searched all kinds of different sources and
things including I don't read it, and interesting stuff that
you find in comments on videos on YouTube, and this
flight ninety comes up it seems like regularly and read it.
And this guy commented and read it and he said, yeah.
I was the hotel manager at the Twin Bridges Samariot
and they and a radio station called me up and
they asked me if there's a plane crash. And I
went to look, and there's no plane crash. I think,
the bizarre story.
Speaker 2: But then I was reading I don't have it.
Speaker 6: There was a the Maryland's Medical Services Systems had a
this ad the first annual disaster conference that was in
months after this, I think it was in the June
or July, and there was a presentation. There was a
paper written by one of the trauma surgeons at gw
HOST who's the head of the Regional Bridge Medical Service System,
and he's telling a story about Flight ninety and he
said that the air traffic tower lost track of the plane.
They didn't know where it was, so the air traffic
tower called up the Twin Bridges Marriott. They asked the
hotel manager to look for airplane crash. And I not
often you get from two different sources talk with the
hotel manager. I said, was there any change that wasn't
a radio station that called you up? That was the
national tower that you get this sort of verification of
this weird anecdote from two very different sources that turn
out to be true. Of all. Yeah, they called up
the hotel to look for an airplane crash.
Speaker 2: That's what happened.
Speaker 3: You can't make this stuff up. So insane. Yeah, A
quick question, Bruce before we moved to a close. If
these accidents were to happen today, would emergency services first
responders be more prepared than they were in nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 6: Of this same exact scenario. Sure, of the survivors in
the middle of ice water, it would really depend. There's
not really good technology other than a boat to get
somebody from the middle of the ice like that. Somebody
told me. I don't know whether or not this is
a regular thing, but somebody told me that a firefighter
came up with a way of attaching fire hoses together.
You cap up the ends and you can inflate it
with air and you can send the fire hose. Whether
or not that's true, I don't know. I'd like to
learn more about it. But you could actually use a
fire hose as a flotation and you could possibly maybe
get it out there. It would It really depends on
the resources that are available at the time where it happens.
As I said this past January, the fireboat was it
had been out of commission for years for repairs. If
there's not a watercraft available to get you from the water,
how else are.
Speaker 2: You going to do it?
Speaker 6: That's in terms of getting people out of the water.
I don't know if what else would be done other
than plucking them out with the helicopter if you could fly.
But under those same exact circumstances in a blizzard, National
Airport had an airboat and that was their water rescue
craft was one little flat bottom boat with the throw
in the back, and that was it. I don't know
what even if they could have gotten that boat out
to the the water, what are you to do with it? Wow?
Speaker 7: Is this the sort of scenario that is used to
help train first responders and people who respond to mass
casualties or is this so entirely out of the pail
that it's not something that is used on the regular That.
Speaker 6: Day was honestly one, and there's a whole part of
it in the book. All the things that changed a
result of the lessons learned on that day. Things are
very different in terms of aircraft maintenance, to the airport operations,
to the design of the flotation cushions, the bests rather,
but certainly the emergency response planning is better in a
practical sense. After this, they all got together and they
decided that we really need to the different jurisdictions, we
need to cooperate, and we need to practice this all together,
and so they did an inter jurisdictional exercise after the crash.
In terms of the lessons learned from the command structure,
how a disaster is managed, the communication, all those things
are much much better today. In fact, many of the
lessons that were learned from January thirteenth, eighty two were
applied than on nine to eleven, nine to eleven What's
North than it would have because of what they learned
from nineteen eighty two, things have been adopted pretty widely
in emergency services in terms of the command structure and
these sorts of things. Once this planet implements and everybody
knows they're respond to, what their parts are, what they're
supposed to do, so that really makes simplifies things where
you don't have confusion about who's in charge and what
are we supposed to be doing and where do we.
Speaker 2: Go with that kind of stuff.
Speaker 7: The book is the worst day, a plane crash, a
train wreck, and remarkable acts of heroism in Washington, d C. First,
where can everybody find the book?
Speaker 6: They can find the book. Wherever they find books, they
at sale at all the usual places they can support.
Independent bookstores are very good. If they don't have an
independent bookstore in the area, you can go to bookshop
dot org, the local library. You can ask for it.
That's very nice. It's available audio, keybook anywhere you get books.
Speaker 7: Fantastic, Firse, thank you so much for joining us for
this episode. We really enjoyed talking to you.
Speaker 6: Thank you for having me. I have enjoyed talking with
you too.
Speaker 5: That is going to do it for this episode of
Mind over Murder. Thank you so much for listening. We'll
see you next time.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.
Speaker 3: Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.
Speaker 1: Our logo art is by Pamela Arnoit.
Speaker 2: Our theme music is by Kevin McLoud.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is distributed in partnership with crawl Space Media.
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Speaker 3: And finally, you can follow Bill Thomas on Twitter at
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Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.