As the monthlong search at the crash site drew to a close last week, investigators described their grisly hunt for clues and victims. National Transportation Safety Board officials estimate they’ve recovered 75 percent of the demolished plane, including both engines, the all-important voice-data recorder and 16 oxygen canisters now suspected to have ignited a fire that precipitated the crash. But the search had its frustrations, too. Only 24 of the 110 ValuJet victims have been identified, and officials hold out little hope of adding to the list.
In the hours after the crash, one of the searchers’ biggest worries was alligators, but the gators had already fled the tainted water. The searchers soon saw why: hydraulic fuel in the water ate away the metal fasteners on the men’s chest-high wader boots. Industrial-strength waders arrived a few days later, but dive teams still had to wear white plastic suits, latex gloves sealed with duct tape, surgical masks and goggles to filter the bacteria that leached from the bits of flesh rotting in the 90-degree heat. The 50 searchers worked mostly in teams of 8 to 10, wading with fishing nets to catch debris they dislodged with hook-tipped poles. A diver who found part of a victim would carry it to an airboat, where it would be photographed, tagged and put in a red bag marked BIOHAZARD. To keep from churning up even more bacteria, NTSB investigators searching for plane parts worked only when divers hunting for human remains were out of the water, and both groups worked in tight 20- to 40-minute shifts. Meanwhile, everyone got tetanus shots, though a few divers still contracted flulike illnesses. Searchers weren’t even allowed to touch their own faces with their gloves on. ““The worst thing was if you had an itch,’’ Llano says.
Given the bleakness of the task, divers reported surprisingly few emotional troubles. The Miami-Dade police sent its chief psychological counselor, but the searchers mostly devised their own ways of coping. Llano says that he wouldn’t look at news of the crash because he didn’t want to know about the victims, their families or the plane’s final minutes. The most wrenching moment Siegel remembers came the day after the victims’ relatives held a memorial at the crash site. ““The airboat turned a corner, and we saw the flowers and the wreaths that the families had left,’’ he says. ““Then I saw what this was all about.''
