Bodies in trees, houses in kerosene. one of the largest plane crashes in the USSR. Identification of plane crash victims: “it is very difficult to identify a dead body” What remains of a human body after a plane crash
Doctors and psychologists prepared to greet people with horror. There were ambulances. We all thought that we would have to rescue, pump out, there would be screams, tears, and so on. But it turned out that everything was completely wrong.
I'll tell you how it was...
Identification carried out in two ways: live and on the computer. First come, first served basis. I took part in computer identification.
Even before the first person was invited, we were shown pictures. It's horrible. Fragments of burnt bodies. Children's hands, feet. The remaining intact pieces of colored clothing peek out. I still remember a piece of the child’s blue panties. It is unknown whether it is a boy or a girl. Nothing was clear about these parts at all.
In the morning, people began to approach the offices. Installation of computers and other preparations were underway...
People were very nervous. There was one question: "When and let's hurry up..."
And so they started to launch. There were five computers. That's why they launched five teams of relatives.
The doctors and I waited in horror for fainting. But here there is none of that. No tears, no screams. Nothing. Monotonous work and only: “Stop, return the previous picture. Here’s something similar. No, not that. Next”
Many were found by jewelry, chains, earrings. Adults by tattoos, who had them. In general, it was a very long procedure, it lasted all day. Some did not find theirs and then went for a second identification...
And now about identification by bodies. It took place in the morgue of Donetsk. All the bodies and fragments were laid out on the street and people, too, were launched in batches, walked by and looked for something similar to theirs. And there were no hysterics or tears either.
Then I saw with my own eyes that serious employment removes emotions, and therefore suffering. Although this, of course, is for a while...
The worst thing is when the body is not found. Then it turns out that it burned down and there is nothing to bury.
There was one funny thing. Maybe I’m wasting my time writing about this. But it’s probably better to know about such stories than not to know. It's very sad though.
One little boy was identified by two families. They began to quarrel and each tried to prove that he was his.
In general, everyone wanted to take the remains so that they would have something to bury. This was a very important question.
And so they look for signs and they find both. And on the first day of arrival, all relatives were tested for DNA. But the result will not come soon.
In general, the doctor saw that this boy was circumcised. And so the truth was established...
And the services of doctors and psychologists on the day of identification - it’s good that they were never needed.
PS. For those who haven’t read, I wrote about my participation in such an event
There were 160 passengers on board the liner, 45 of them were minor children - all of them were returning home after a holiday at sea. However, due to a crew error and bad weather, control of the plane was lost - as a result, it crashed to the ground and caught fire. No one managed to survive.
13 years ago, on the morning of August 22, 2006, the crew of a Tu-154 aircraft was preparing to fly regular flight from Vityazevo airport in Anapa to St. Petersburg Pulkovo. 160 passengers boarded the liner: 115 adults and 45 children, six of whom were infants, and the rest were barely 12 years old.
August was very hot, but a few days before the flight departed, cold air arrived to the south, which provoked severe thunderstorms with downpours. According to the forecast, two centers of thunderstorms awaited the plane along its route, in which heavy downpours and even hail were observed. However, the commander of the aircraft, 49-year-old Ivan Korogodin, did not attach much importance to the weather forecasters' warnings and decided to fly.
At 11:04, the plane took off from Vityazevo and took its assigned flight level of 5.7 thousand meters. Eight minutes after the start of the flight, the control controller from Rostov-on-Don contacted the flight and warned of powerful thunderstorms with heavy hail. At the same time, he forgot to indicate the height of the thunderstorm front, which reached unusually high values- 12-13 km.
At that time, the crew themselves already saw the impending threat, as became clear from the recording of the conversation in the cockpit between the navigator and the commander. The words of the PIC can be heard on it: “Oh, we’re going straight into a cloud. How ugly."
Nevertheless, the plane managed to safely bypass the frightening cloud - the crew calmly exhaled, not suspecting that the worst awaited them ahead.
The second thunderstorm was lying in wait for the plane in the sky over the Donetsk region. At this time, the plane had already been handed over to the dispatchers of the Kharkov regional center, who did not convey information about the disaster to the flight. As a result, the St. Petersburg crew headed straight towards the thunderstorm, without having any information about its size.
At 15:30 the Tu-154 entered a zone of clouds through which hail was breaking through. In order to bypass the dangerous terrain, the commander of flight 612, Korogodin, decided to raise the airliner higher: in just 5-6 seconds, the 85-ton machine flew up almost 400 meters. Continuing to climb at a vertical speed of approximately 68.6 m/s, the aircraft raised its nose to an angle of climb of 45.7°, after which it fell to the right and began to enter a flat spin. The crew lost control of the plane, which went into an uncontrolled fall.
For some time, the commander was still trying to stabilize the rapidly falling vehicle, deflecting the steering wheel either “toward” or “away from himself,” thereby raising and lowering the nose.
The SOS distress signal was sent at the direction of Korogodin at an altitude of 7.2 thousand meters. About two and a half minutes later, the plane collided with the ground 35 km from Donetsk.
The first blow hit the right wing and right engine of the plane, then a split second later the left wing also entered the ground, and the tail came off. Upon impact, the plane's fuel tanks exploded, after which the fuselage was torn into pieces.
One of the witnesses to the fall of the Tu-154 was Gennady Urasov - at the time of the tragedy he was in his apiary near the village of Sukhaya Balka. The airliner crashed just 300 meters from her.
“Suddenly I heard a terrible roar. I raised my head and was stunned: a plane was falling on me. It was spinning in the air like the millstones of a mill, but I did not see it burning. Then I heard a pop and hit the ground. I'm already deaf. Our people, who saw the plane fall, ran to the scene of the tragedy to try to save someone. But you couldn’t even get close to it, it was burning so hot,” the man told the KP newspaper.
According to eyewitnesses, specialist Donetsk airport arrived at the crash site within 20 minutes and immediately informed the rescuers exact coordinates crash of Tu-154. However, the firefighters who arrived could not even get close to the plane, as heavy rain began. Streams of water washed away the hillside, so the fire had to be extinguished through a hose that stretched from a nearby lake. 10 fire engines were used for this purpose.
By the evening of the next day, fragments of the bodies of 150 victims were recovered from the rubble, which were delivered to Donetsk in black plastic bags.
“I’ve been working for the Ministry of Emergency Situations for eight years, but I’ve never seen anything like this,” recalled one of the rescuers in a conversation with KP. - Children and their mothers are literally intertwined into one whole. The bodies were terribly burned. There is horror on their faces."
Among the passengers of the crashed liner that day was Andrei Frolov. Initially, the man was not supposed to fly on this plane - he even purchased a train ticket. However, on the last day, he decided to stay in Anapa for another day and planned a flight on flight 612. His mother and her grandson left by train, not suspecting that a few days later they would have to go to the identification procedure.
The tragedy near Donetsk was one of the three largest plane crashes involving the Tu-154. The final results of the investigation into the disaster were published on February 17, 2007. They were presented by a government commission chaired by the head of the Ministry of Transport of the Russian Federation Igor Levitin.
“The cause of the crash of the Pulkovo Airlines Tu-154M RA-85185 aircraft was the aircraft’s withdrawal, when flying in control mode, to supercritical angles of attack and stall mode, followed by a transition into a flat spin and a collision with the ground at a high vertical speed,” the document reported.
After the plane crash near Donetsk, Levitin also promised that the Tu-154 and Tu-134 would be replaced by other ships within 5 years. Relatives of those killed in the plane crash and aviation experts then spoke out in favor of banning flights on these planes.
“In our case, the investigation found the commander guilty. They referred to the inadequacy of his actions, pulled the steering wheel to the side, and this led to the stalling of the plane, in simple terms. Plus the bad ones weather. But all these are consequences, not causes of the disaster,” Vitaly Yusko, co-founder of the public regional organization for helping victims of plane crashes “Interrupted Flight,” told reporters.
A year after the tragedy, a monument to the victims was erected at the site of the fall of the fuselage, one and a half kilometers from the village of Sukhaya Balka. It is made of white concrete and represents part of an airplane wing. Around it there are marble slabs on which are engraved views of St. Petersburg and the names of passengers on flight PLK-612.
Initially, the composition of the monument was also supposed to include the engine of the crashed plane. For this purpose, the investigative commission even gave permission to use a fragment of the Tu-154. However, later the authors of the monument abandoned this idea, since the unguarded monument could be attacked by hunters for non-ferrous metals.
On October 20, 1986, at 15:58 Moscow time, a TU-134 plane of the Grozny air squad of the North Caucasus Directorate crashed at Kuibyshev airport (now Samara, Kurumoch airport). civil aviation, following the route "Sverdlovsk-Grozny". Photographs of this disaster, taken by the head of the fire testing laboratory V.V., have been preserved. Frygin. We must understand that in Soviet time all plane crashes were classified. KGB officers immediately appeared at the scene of the accident, making sure that no one took photographs. V.V. Frygin still managed to hide one of the two films.
01. The bodies of the dead are taken out of the plane
"Special message. To the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, Comrade N.I. Ryzhkov. Top secret.
On October 20, 1986, at 15:58 Moscow time, a TU-134 plane of the Grozny air squad of the North Caucasus Civil Aviation Administration, flying along the Sverdlovsk-Grozny route, crashed at Kuibyshev airport. At the time of the incident, there were 85 passengers on board the plane, including 14 children, and 8 crew members.
Right after emergency landing A fire broke out on board the plane. The airport's emergency rescue service and the fire departments of the city of Kuibyshev extinguished the fire, 16 people from among the passengers and crew were rescued, the rest of the survivors left the burning plane on their own or were carried out by the crew. Immediately at the time of the disaster, 53 passengers and 5 crew members died, 28 people were hospitalized. Subsequently, 11 more people died in hospitals. A government commission arrived at Kuibyshev Airport to investigate the causes of the disaster.
Chairman of the Kuibyshev Regional Executive Committee V.A. Pogodin."
02.
On October 20, 1986, the weather in Samara was excellent, the wind was 2-3 meters per second. A TU-134 plane is landing. But something is wrong... The plane is landing too quickly and at too sharp an angle. The plane literally hits the concrete runway on its belly, the landing gear breaks, it is dragged along the runway, then skids to the right, lands on the ground, and the plane flips over. The right wing came off and the left wing folded in half. The hull broke into two parts and kerosene poured out of the fuel tanks onto the hot engine turbines. A fire started. Three flight attendants burned to death. An oxygen cylinder was stored next to their cabin, the fitting of which was knocked out and a hot stream of oxygen hit them directly. All that was left of the flight attendants were fragments of skulls and shin bones.
03.
Recalls Sergei Churilov, in 1986, the political officer of the company of the patrol service regiment of the Internal Affairs Directorate of the city of Samara: “On the evening of October 20, I was on duty in the village of Bereza. Suddenly, a strong bang was heard from the direction of the airport, and half a minute later the radio began to crackle: all free vehicles should arrive urgently onto the runway. When we entered the airport, we saw a plane broken into two parts, its wing torn off and burning. I also remember that a woman was holding out a child from a break in the body, and the pilot got out of his cabin, caught his breath a little - and again. climbed into the plane, pulled someone out into the air - and again inside, after the passengers. In total, the firefighters extinguished everything that was burning, and we, the police officers who arrived on the alert, were dispersed about a hundred and fifty meters from the crashed plane. "We were warned not to let anyone outside the cordon except members of the government commission."
04. Loading corpses 
A man in handcuffs ran out of the plane and stopped as he ran away from the plane. It turned out that a repeat offender was being transported from Grozny. And, although the conditions for escape were ideal, he did not run away, but waited until the police noticed him.
Five or six people escaped through a hatch in the tail compartment, which was opened by one of the passengers. But this hatch, as the commission later established, became the cause of the death of several more passengers, since there was a crack in front through which air flowed. A “kiln draft” effect was created. Flames and smoke went through the entire cabin, and since the interior trim releases all sorts of rubbish when burning, the passengers breathed it in and got poisoned
05. Upside down airplane cabin 
At 16.59, the control panel of SVPCH-8 of the Krasnoglinsky district of Kuibyshev received a message from the fire department dispatcher at the Kurumoch airport: “Your help is needed, the plane is burning at the airport.” They arrived 20 minutes later, but there was no fire. 18 units of rescue equipment arrived from Kuibyshev. The fact is that the flames were suppressed by the airport's fire and rescue services. They arrived to him literally a minute and a half after the signal was received, having gathered and traveled a kilometer distance, which is better than the standards. Then the government commission raised the alarm 18 times in a row, forcing them to rush to the point of the fire, and all the time the result was one and a half minutes. The commission found that 69 deaths were not the fault of firefighters. They acted promptly and professionally; the entire plane just caught fire too quickly.
The fire was extinguished at 17.44. The head of the fire department, Colonel A.K., arrived at the scene of the fire. Karpov and the fire extinguishing headquarters of the UPO, which included the engineer of this laboratory, and now the head of the fire testing laboratory V.V. Frygin, whose photographs we see. This is what he recalls: “Not everyone could contemplate such a terrible picture without shuddering. Many were immediately sickened by the sight of corpses and the sickening smell of burnt meat. At the same time, there was such a suffocating smell in the cabin from the burnt lining that it was only possible to work in a gas mask. When I I dived into a smoke-filled crack in the hull, and immediately saw dead people fastened with belts hanging above my head. After all, the plane turned over during the fall, and as a result, all the seats with passengers ended up upside down and, as it were, on the ceiling. Many corpses were completely missing. clothes, and others - only without shoes. All this was either torn off from them by a stream of air or burned in a flame.
06.
I see a girl hanging from the belts and seems to be moving - which means she may still be alive. I took her in my arms and began to make my way back to the exit. Then I saw another child in a blue overall, lying on the floor - that is, on the ceiling, which at that moment became the floor. There was still air there, and that meant there was still a chance that the baby would survive. I was already bending over to the child when dead people began to fall from above, right on top of me. Two of them collapsed right on top of the baby - such healthy men. Apparently, the belts holding them melted, and the bodies fell one after another onto the rescuers. I still pulled the children out, but I couldn’t save them.
07.
Not only did I carry corpses from the plane, but as part of my duty, I also tried to take as many photographs of the scene of the incident as possible. I understood that they would then be very useful in investigating the causes of the tragedy. However, this unique photographic film was almost destroyed. The fact is that almost simultaneously with us, KGB officers arrived at the scene of the disaster. And in the darkness, the uniforms of the firefighters and KGB officers looked quite similar, and, apparently, that’s why, without any special obstacles from state security officers, I managed to snap off almost the entire film within 15-20 minutes. I filmed the charred plane, the bodies of passengers hanging on belts, and the loading of corpses into cars.
But soon the KGB officers realized it. While taking another photo, I heard a conversation behind me: “What kind of photographer is walking around here? He doesn’t look like ours. We need to find out.” I immediately realized: the film had to be removed. Without hesitating for a minute, I ran behind the car, quickly rewound the almost completely filmed tape to the beginning and took it out of the device. Just then one of the fire fighters I knew was passing by. I gave him the cassette and told him to hide it deep in his inner pocket, and asked him to return it only to me personally and only upon arrival in Kuibyshev.
08.
As soon as I inserted a new film into the camera and took a few shots, KGB officers approached me. They checked my documents, listened to my words that the photographs would be needed for the investigation, but then they still forced me to open the camera and exposed the film. They explained that permission to photograph was issued only to an employee of their department, and therefore they warned me not to hang around the plane with my camera anymore. Therefore, if I hadn’t realized it in time and hidden the film, then hardly anyone would have seen the pictures of the airliner that crashed in 1986.”
09.
Passengers and participants in the firefight recall that the TU-134 co-pilot Evgeny Zhirnov pulled several people out of the plane. And when he pulled the woman through the pilot's cabin, he sank to the ground, said that he had difficulty breathing and lost consciousness. Three days later he died in the Berezovsky medical unit.
10. Valery Frygin 
So what caused the disaster? The “black box” recorded all the conversations and the incredible was revealed. The crew commander, pilot first class Alexander Klyuev, bet with other crew members that he would land the plane blindly, using only instrument readings. He closed all the windows with metal curtains and went to land. But he went at too steep an angle and at an excessive speed. Calculations showed that the chassis hit the concrete strip with a load one and a half times greater than the tensile strength. At first, during interrogation by the investigator, Klyuev fully admitted to the dispute, but then at the trial he changed his testimony, saying that before landing there was a fuel leak and one of the engines failed. But his testimony was not confirmed by the case materials and technical expertise. The court gave him 15 years in prison. But after Klyuev’s petition, his sentence was changed to 6 years in prison.
Over Torez in the Donetsk region became a black page in the history of Ukraine and a tragedy on a global scale. In the area where the Malaysia Airlines plane crashed, including near the village of Grabovo, specialists are combing the area in search of bodies, belongings and remains of the plane. White flags mark the remains of passengers' bodies.
The footage from the scene is amazing - charred bones, body parts, torn watches, burnt components of the aircraft.
WARNING. Photos are not recommended for viewing by children, women and people with mental problems
Let us remind you that the Boeing 777 plane crash claimed the lives of 298 people, including. Among the victims of the disaster near Thorez are 154 citizens of the Netherlands, 27 citizens of Australia, 23 citizens of Malaysia, the USA, six citizens of Great Britain, Australia, 11 citizens of Indonesia, four citizens of Germany, three citizens of the Philippines, four citizens of Belgium, one citizen of Canada. The citizenship of the remaining 47 victims is being clarified.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called the crash terrorist act. The Ministry of Internal Affairs stated that the airliner was shot down by a Buk air defense system. A video has appeared on the Internet in which a Buk anti-aircraft missile system, presumably with militias, passes through the city of Snizhne (Donetsk region) shortly before the crash.
To the fall Malaysian Boeing, although before information about the crash of a passenger airliner appeared, the Russian media, citing supporters of the self-proclaimed Donetsk people's republic"it was reported that
Robert Jensen has built a career cleaning up the mess after major disasters: identifying remains, caring for the families of the victims, and recovering their personal belongings. That's how he became the best at the worst job in the world.
The team stumbled through the jungle. The group had little idea where they were going or what they would find there. A few days ago, search planes flying high above the foothills of the Andes spotted the wreckage of a crashed helicopter littering a steep, rocky slope. It was impossible to reach this chaos from the air, so the team had to dismount.
The group pushing through the brush was led by Robert Jensen, a tall, strong man wearing a white helmet with the letters "BOB" scrawled in marker on the front. They had to fight through the bushes for two days to get to the place. Six days later, Jensen will be the last one to leave. It was Jensen who was contacted first by the mining group Rio Tinto, which hired the crashed helicopter to fly employees from a Peruvian copper mine to the city of Chiclayo. It was Jensen who strategized how to get to the crash site when it became clear that all ten people on board were dead, and the wreckage was scattered across the winding mountain ridges of tropical Yosemite. Jensen assembled a team: two Peruvian police officers, two investigators, several forensic anthropologists and a group of rangers national park, accustomed to climbing mountains during search and rescue expeditions. They all knew that this expedition would not be a rescue one.
Jensen is the person companies call when the worst happens. The worst is all those events that inspire such horror and panic that most people prefer not to think about them, such as plane crashes, terrorist attacks and natural disasters. Jensen has no special gift for collecting bodies, identifying personal items or talking to family members of the dead. What he does have is experience. Over the course of his long career, Jensen has spent decades earning a reputation as the best in this unusual business. As the owner of Kenyon International Emergency Services, Jensen receives between 6 and 20 applications per year worldwide (9 in 2016, not counting those that have continued since 2015). Because of his work, he constantly finds himself involved in events that generate the saddest headlines modern history. He handled funeral work after the Oklahoma bombing, he flew straight to the Pentagon after 9/11, and he helped recover bodies when Hurricane Katrina hit.
2008 helicopter crash in Peru international news missed, but the mission became memorable for Jensen because of its complexity. Everything was sticky from the heat, and the dangers of the jungle lurked everywhere. Jensen decided that the team would travel in pairs, out of fear of cougars and snakes. Before leaving, he carried out a risk assessment and learned that 23 species of venomous snakes live in this area. He only had antivenom for three, so he urged his team members to try to get a good look at who exactly bit them before losing consciousness, in case this happened.
They were there to collect everything they could - personal belongings, skeletal fragments and any evidence that would help the families of the victims understand how their loved ones ended their days. Before they could do all this, they had to get there. Jensen works as efficiently as possible: all possible difficulties have already been taken into account and resolved with military composure. Jensen instructed his team to start clearing a spot for the helicopter to land and for the climbers to string ropes up the slope so they could climb up and down. They collected each fragment into containers to then hand over to an archaeologist, who sifted through them in search of bone fragments. To the untrained eye, it would seem that nothing of value could be found: the flight data recorder had already been removed, and it was clear that there were no survivors. Still, Jensen searched.
In total, he and his team collected 110 skeletal fragments from the mountain, as well as some personal items and a cockpit recording device. The remains found by Kenyon allowed the identification of almost everyone on board, which is a rarity and a sign of skill when working with high-speed disasters. Every night the team buried what they found, holding moments of silence. The next morning, all the remains were exhumed and taken away by helicopter, and the team began work again.
After days of clearing the slope and collecting everything they could, Jensen suddenly saw something high in a tree up the slope - a large piece of human tissue caught on a branch. Getting there was incredibly risky, even with cables, but Jensen couldn't leave his find behind. He climbed up, collected what he found and placed it in a plastic bag. His work was done. Everything he found will be given to the families of the victims. “So that they knew for sure that the bodies of their loved ones were not just left in the jungle,” Jensen remembers, “Not a piece.”
Context
The Tu-154 plane, which disappeared near Sochi, crashed in the Black Sea
RIA Novosti 12/25/2016Jerzy Bar about the Smolensk disaster
Wirtualna Polska 04/12/2016More than 60 people died in the disaster
Reuters 03/20/2016Why is EgyptAir having so many problems?
Expressen 05/20/2016Jensen doesn't have any heartbreaking rescue stories to tell. What he is looking for has a more abstract value - it is a part of a person, literally or figuratively, which he can return to the family of the deceased with the words: “We tried.” He knows from experience that when someone's life is shattered, even the smallest pieces can bring peace.
Many of the things Jensen and his team found went to Kenyon's offices in Bracknell, a town an hour's drive from London where there are as many carousels as people. From the outside, you wouldn’t be able to tell that this building was built for a service that deals with the consequences of mass casualties. The facade of the building is completely ordinary: a rough concrete box, indistinguishable from the other offices around it. A small disco ball glitters through the blinds of one of the office windows. But behind the façade of the office building lies a huge hangar-like warehouse where collected personal items are photographed, identified and restored.
Perfectly organized on metal shelves throughout the warehouse are the tools needed for the million tasks Kenyon performs on duty. One closet contains all the clothes and such that Jensen needs to process quickly, each item in a labeled zip-lock bag. It has everything you need to provide first aid of any type on the scene, and body armor for when Kenyon is called to hot spots. There's a basket of prayer rugs for Muslim families and a box of teddy bears wearing Kenyon T-shirts for children at Family Help Centers. A refrigerated truck, a mobile morgue, is located in the corner, its door slightly open. There's a coffin wrapped in purple fabric against one wall, which Jensen explains is a "training tool" for the team, but it still looks ominous. A student works at a desk, using Photoshop to place photos of found personal items on a white background to make it easier for families to identify them later. The rain drums on the roof, but otherwise there is grave silence here.
Kenyon only recently moved into the premises, chosen for its proximity to Heathrow Airport, but Kenyon itself has rich story. In 1906, Harold and Herbert Kenyon, the sons of an English funeral director, were asked to help identify and bring home the 28 bodies of those killed in a train accident near Salisbury. The Kenyons, as the firm's employees still call themselves, got down to business as soon as they heard the terrible news about major disaster. At that time they could not yet identify people by DNA. Victims were identified by fingerprints and dental records if they had them, or by personal belongings if they did not. While technology became more and more complex, disasters with mass loss of life became more and more widespread. Air travel became faster and more accessible, and plane crashes claimed more lives. The weapons became more and more powerful. The need for specialists grew and Kenyon became an international company.
Today, most people believe that it is governments that deal with the consequences of large-scale disasters. This is often true: Jensen's extensive experience before joining Kenyon in 1998 was in the U.S. Army handling mortuary affairs. But it's not just the military doing this; companies like Kenyon have their hands full, not only because of their high level of expertise, but also because it can be useful to have a team on hand without political affiliation. In the 2004 tsunami in Thailand, more than 40 countries lost tourists, and each worked to return the bodies of the dead to their families. After the tsunami, bodies are not easily identified, and ethnicity provides little indication of nationality: “I will stand up in Phuket and tell all Swedes to stand up. And no one will answer,” Jensen says. “We all have to work together.” Kenyon provided the equipment and acted as an honest broker, not favoring any nationality over another.
Along with terrorism, Jensen's work often involves plane crashes. Many passengers assume that in the event of a plane crash, the airline takes on many of the associated responsibilities. More often than not, they don't. Airlines and governments keep companies like Kenyon on hand because they can't afford to make a mistake with such a responsibility. In addition to the ethical imperative to do right by the victims' families, there are huge financial losses at stake if the work is done poorly. Years of litigation and waves of overwhelming negativity and claims from disgruntled families can become critical. Malaysia Airlines, for example, has barely dealt with widespread criticism over its responsibility for the MH370 and MH17 tragedies (Malaysia Airlines, Jensen reminded me several times, is not a Kenyon customer). Airlines can outsource everything to Kenyon; their services include organizing call centers, identifying and delivering bodies home, mass graves, and recovering the personal belongings of the dead.
Some of what is expected of an airline in the event of a disaster was written into federal law 20 years ago. Before this, carriers got away with performing their duties rather erratically. Families who succeeded in pushing for stronger federal regulation on the issue lost loved ones after the U.S. Flight 427 disaster. Air when a plane crashed near Pittsburgh in 1994. According to heartbreaking letters from families of victims to the airline, the response of U.S. Air on the crash was unsatisfactory to say the least.
“When it turned out that personal belongings ended up in garbage containers,” writes one of the relatives of the deceased, “this was already enough to infuriate any caring person. Who decides which personal items are important and which go in the trash? After all, we are talking about human lives!! Sometimes the luggage tag is the only thing a person has left!”
Some countries are still lagging behind in resolving such situations. Mary Schiavo, an aviation lawyer and former Department of Transportation inspector general, told me that after one crash in Venezuela, authorities conducted a casual search for remains and then dug up what was left with a backhoe from a nearby farm. “I don't mean that anyone isn't kind or sensitive enough, because without a doubt the people I've worked with over the years have tried to be both kind and sensitive in handling the remains,” Mary Schiavo added. “But sometimes they didn’t have enough experience to pay the attention to detail that the National Transportation Safety Board or professional groups like Kenyon would. More precisely, I mean the Kenyon group." Kenyon is the difference between a perfect response and decades of litigation.
When a commercial flight crashes, the client immediately notifies Jensen. Typically the client is the airline, although in some cases it could be a company like Rio Tinto or even the country where the plane crashed. He collects all the information he can. First he tries to figure out who is responsible for what. Kenyon is a private company, so if the government decides to take over the administration of the cleanup effort, Jensen defers to them while remaining on hand for consultation. In a few minutes on the phone, Jensen learns enough about the incident to understand what the airline's most pressing needs are. In a matter of hours, Kenyon's workforce could swell from 27 full-time employees to 900 contracted independent contractors, depending on the severity of the disaster. Kenyon team members are not industry specific, although many have law enforcement backgrounds. All have one thing in common: they are very empathic, although they retain the ability to emotionally distance themselves from the victims of the disaster. “You don’t have to get involved,” Jensen reminds them. Jensen prefers not to maintain contact with the families of the victims, considering himself a kind of activator of their grief.
Each employee and team member has their own responsibilities and performs them as needed. In the long hallway of a building in Bracknell hangs a chart showing the course of action during a crisis. There are countless color-coded circles crowded around it, each representing a job that needs to be done. At the very top is a red ball representing the Senior Incident Coordinator - Jensen.
Around the world, crisis communications team members keep their phones nearby, ready to answer questions from the media. At this time, the hotel communications team travels to a hotel located near the crash site. Families of victims from all over the world are flying into the disaster area, so the hotel must be large enough to accommodate them all. Once families and Kenyon staff have arrived, the selected hotel receives a manual by mail or fax on how to select rooms and prepare them for grieving guests. For the next few days, the hotel is being transformed into a Family Assistance Center, where family members of the victims will wait, grieve together and make the best of their time between briefings.
While his plan to establish a Family Assistance Center is being carried out, Jensen is already on his way to the scene. Once Jensen has an idea of the condition of the bodies, he will begin giving instructions about the morgue. For this, it is not so much the number of victims that is important, but the condition of the bodies. Crash small plane, which crashed in Mozambique in 2013, for example, required more effort to organize the collection and storage of bodies than disasters with large commercial flights. Although only 33 passengers died, 900 body fragments were found.
Jensen often has to act as a liaison between the families staying at the hotel and the crew at the crash site. Every high-death disaster is different, but Kenyon employees rarely work alone on the scene of a disaster—even in the case of the Rio Tinto crash in Peru, the government required two Peruvian police officers to join the team. Kenyon works alongside local law enforcement, medical examiners, firefighters and the military. Each of them works quickly to prevent weather conditions from causing further damage to unprotected remains and personal belongings.
Once Jensen learns more details about the disaster, he organizes a meeting for the families of the victims. Such briefings are very difficult. “You can't undo what happened, so the best you can do is not make it worse,” Jensen says grimly. “You have a very difficult task.” Jensen desperately wants to give the families a small glimmer of hope, but instead he must deliver the brutal facts. He first warns families that they are about to hear very specific information. Parents take their children out of the room. “You have to realize that there was a high-speed impact, which means your loved ones now look different from us,” he says something like this. “This means we will likely find several thousand fragments of human remains.” At this moment, suffocation begins. Jensen drained all hope from the room. Now his job is to help people go through transformation.
Once remains and personal effects are collected from the crash site, the Kenyons collect dental and other medical records and conduct lengthy interviews with families, trying to uncover any details that could help identify the victims. Each family must choose one person to receive the remains and personal items found. Some disputes end in court. Kenyon staff explains what procedures are followed with personal items and asks families the necessary questions: Do they want the items found to be cleaned? Do they want to receive them by hand or by mail? Jensen leaves every detail up to the families of the victims. They have little control over the circumstances in which they find themselves, and making decisions about personal belongings gives them back a sense of some kind of control.
Families may also decide not to participate in the process. For some, personal items don't matter. For some, the remains are not important. But almost everyone wants to take part. Hailey Shanks was just four years old when her mother, a flight attendant, died in the 2000 crash of Alaska 261. Her grandmother received her mother's found things - a button from a uniform and a belly button ring - and it would never have occurred to her not to take them. “I think the thought of throwing away any memory of what happened just couldn’t occur to her,” Shanks says. Grandma Shanks keeps them in a small box in her bedroom. Sometimes Shanks takes them for herself, but the trauma associated with them torments her too much. However, she is glad that her grandmother keeps them. “I think she's very worried that she couldn't be there - not in the sense that she wanted to be there - but that her daughter was in that situation. I think any memory of her and what happened is very important in itself. Any piece."
At the crash site, Jensen and his team remove any hazardous substances that could cause further damage to items, but items arrive at Bracknell in varying states. They are wet from the weather and from the water used to put out the fire, and they smell like jet fuel and decomposition. Once the container is delivered, team members carefully unpack each box and place the items on long tables in the middle of the room. The items are examined and divided into two groups: "correlated" - things with the names of passengers on them or things found near or on the body, and "uncorrelated" - which includes everything from a watch found in a pile of debris to a suitcase, marked with a name that is not on the passenger list. Correlated items are returned first, while uncorrelated items are photographed and placed in an online catalog that families of the victims can study in the hope of identifying one of the items.
Before it was possible to post photo catalogs online, they were made in paper format, with six or more items on each page. I spend an hour leafing through one of these catalogs left over from a plane crash a decade ago. Whatever the purpose of its creation, the catalog provides an excellent insight into the style and popular culture of the time. There's Jessica Simpson's "Irresistible" CD and a water-stained book by Ian Rankin. Some things are badly damaged. A blackened Lego set and several pages of glasses without lenses and with terribly crooked arms, like from Dali’s paintings. Here are some black boxes with the Chief from " South Park"on the lid. Here is a page with engraved wedding rings - Patricia, Marisa, Marietta, Laura, Giovanni - and a small airplane pin. Next to each item there is a column where its condition is described, and everywhere there is a “damaged” mark.
As the families of the disaster victims identify what they can from the catalog, Jensen continues to work to match the remaining items with those who died. He works tirelessly. He and his team are using every possible piece of evidence, including camera photos and recovered cell phone numbers. Jensen even takes car keys to dealers to try to get the vehicle identification number. vehicle. Typically, dealers can only tell you the country in which the car was sold, but even this can be important evidence. For example, Jensen learned that a set of car keys found after the Germanwing plane crash came from a car sold in Spain, greatly narrowing the number of victims to whom they could have belonged.
Identifying personal items can be much more difficult than identifying bodies. “When you examine human remains, you're doing a physical examination,” explains Jensen. “You're talking to the family and asking them questions to gather information and identify the individual—that's not personalization. But when you look into personal things, you can learn everything about a person. For example, what's on his playlist? Of course, your goal isn't to find out what's on their playlist, you're just looking at what's on the computer to try to figure out who it is." The body is the body, but personal belongings are life. It's impossible to distance yourself from the deceased when you're looking through his or her wedding photos from just a few weeks ago.
Jensen has encountered things that, under other circumstances, he would have found personally outrageous. “Just think that all this luggage went through control at the airport. Imagine all these different societies, religions and groups that the people on the plane represent. Their personal lives tell about all this. You take a thing and think: "Oh my God. Who would need this? Why did you need this picture or this book? Why did you support this organization? "" He cares about all these things no less than about others - "You can't get involved" .
Each stage of returning items is a decision that must be made by the family of the deceased. You cannot simply assume that relatives will want to receive cleaned items. Jensen tells the story of one woman who lost her daughter in the Pan Am 103 disaster when the plane exploded over Lockerbie in 1988. At first, when the woman received her daughter's belongings, she was upset that they smelled like fuel. It permeated the entire house. But after some time, the woman began to value it as the last reminder of her daughter. “You shouldn’t deprive anyone of choice, because you may, for example, meet a mother who will say: “I’ve been doing my son’s laundry for 15 years, and I want the person who washes his shirt for the last time to be me.” not you"".
Many of the things Jensen found will never be returned. After two years or however long it takes to complete the search procedure, the lost items collected by Jensen will be destroyed. But the impressions and experiences he received will remain in his memory and will often return to him and help him.
Jensen, for example, knows why you shouldn't put on a life jacket before leaving a sinking plane: he's been to crash sites where he's seen the horrific sight of people floating inside the plane, trapped by their life jackets while how the others survived. He knows that it is useless to spend his whole life afraid of dying during some disaster. He thinks about the woman whose body was found in the wreckage of the Oklahoma bombing. She had a high-heeled shoe on one foot and a street shoe on the other. He realized that this woman had just come to the office and was changing her shoes. If she had been five minutes late for work that day, she would have lived.
Like the others, Jensen wonders how he would feel and behave at the very end. “I know which things belonging to my family members I would like to have returned to me. “I know what, I wish Brandon had it,” he nods toward his husband, Kenyon CEO Brandon Jones. “The engagement ring, the bracelets (Jones and Jensen are wearing woven bracelets that they gave each other) are special things. He might want to sell them,” he jokes.
Jones thinks for a moment. “It’s strange,” he says, “I’m not afraid to fly. I didn't look at life any differently than I did before Kenyon. But I began to evaluate the importance of things differently. For example, there are things that I always carry with me, they are always in my bag. Souvenirs that he brought me from the places he visited and which are always with me. Things I may not see on a daily basis, but I certainly always see when I fold up my passport. And laying out his things on the plane, I think that they would mean something to him, that he would keep them if they were returned to him.”
Work has taught Jensen that fear of disaster doesn't help, but he still always counts the exit doors before entering a hotel room, and when traveling by plane, neither he nor Jones ever take off their shoes before passing out. “fasten your seat belts” sign (most accidents happen during takeoff and landing, and you don’t want to end up barefoot on the runway, if you have to urgently run outside). I asked if Jensen had a secret for staying calm in an age of terrorism, and here it is: Allow yourself to worry about everyday worries and don't waste time on the horrors.
Most families prefer to receive personal items by mail, then they are wrapped in white wrapping paper if they are large, or placed in small boxes. Some families want items delivered to them in person. And then it becomes very difficult.
One day, Jensen needed to return the personal belongings of a young man who had died in a plane crash. Early in the morning of the day of the disaster, he called his mother and said that he was boarding a plane. She found out later that day when she turned on the TV and saw that the plane had crashed into the ocean.
But after that, Jensen remembers, she still wasn't sure. Could her son have sailed to the nearest island? Maybe the coast guard will check? They checked, of course. Several days after the disaster, almost all the passengers were identified by DNA samples, but none of the pieces of tissue belonged to her son.
When the passengers' personal belongings washed ashore, fishermen and sheriffs retrieved them. They found several of her son's belongings, including two water-soaked passports (one containing a visa) and a suitcase that appeared to belong to him. The company called his mother and asked if she wanted the items delivered or mailed. She asked someone to bring them, and Jensen volunteered to do it.
Jensen remembers arriving at the woman's house and seeing her son's truck still parked outside the house. His room had not been touched since he left on his journey. The woman left her job and lived in suspended animation. “She couldn't cope,” Jensen recalls. - There was no evidence. There was no body." Jensen and one of his employees cleared the table and covered it with a white cloth. They asked the mother to leave and began unpacking her son's things. They covered them so that the sight of all the things at once would not shock her too much. They asked her to come in.
They showed their mother two passports. She dropped her head into her hands and rocked back and forth. The next item surprised Jensen. When they opened the suitcase, they found a set of orange curlers, like the ones Jensen's mother used in the 70s. The young man had short hair - it was very strange. Jensen suggested that the fisherman found the suitcase half open and put another passenger's item in it. “Please don’t be offended,” he said, taking out curlers.
The woman looked at the curlers. She said they belonged to her son. He borrowed her mother's suitcase, in which she kept her curlers. He knew how much they meant to his grandmother, the woman told Jensen. He didn’t put them anywhere, but simply left them in their place. Jensen remembers the way she looked at him after that: “So, Robert, you're telling me that my son isn't coming home.”
InoSMI materials contain assessments exclusively from foreign media and do not reflect the position of the InoSMI editorial staff.
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