Daily Nightmare for Everglades Searchers

MIAMI — In his 22 years as a police officer, Sgt. Dave Eklund has closed the eyes of murder victims, pried bodies from cars mangled on the highway and dived deep into dark canals to free corpses from cement block anchors. He has seen death.

But nothing prepared him for wading through the marshy, waist-high waters of the Everglades with a fish net to scoop up the remains of the 110 people who perished May 11 in the crash of ValuJet Flight 592.

“We’ve never seen anything of this magnitude,” said Eklund, 44, a certified diver who normally works auto theft for the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., police. Eklund is one of the thousands of police, fire and coroners’ personnel across the country who are called upon daily to clean up the nation’s disasters. They respond to all manner of horrific accidents on freeways, railroads and runways. But the site of the ValuJet crash has put them to a test never seen before.

Four weeks after Flight 592 went down they continue to make their grisly dives, fighting off fatigue, horror and depression with each hour in the swamp.

The inaccessibility of the crash site, along with oppressive heat, a rugged, marshy terrain and a wide field of chuck-sized debris that remains shrouded beneath a 6-foot layer of water and black muck, have presented investigators and search crews with an unprecedented challenge.

“There is no standard procedures manual,” said Michael Benson, spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board, or NTSB. “It is extraordinary.”

Amazingly, the crews have recovered about 70% of the plane, pulled from the marshes in tiny pieces and transported to a nearby airport hangar, where investigators are reconstructing the forward cargo hold and hunting for clues to the origin of an on-board fire. More than 100 oxygen generators in the cargo hold are suspected of starting or fueling the blaze.

But even if NTSB officials end the search for wreckage this weekend, Metro-Dade County Detective Mike McDonald said police divers expect to continue combing the marsh for remains and personal effects.

About 90 officers--the majority of them Metro-Dade homicide detectives, underwater recovery team members and officers from the Special Response Team--have worked the taxing body-recovery detail.

From interviews with those police officers emerges a picture of the recovery operation that is grueling and nightmarish to even the most hardened cops.

The virtually inaccessible location--just 15 miles from the runways at Miami International Airport--has complicated everything. Even now, most of those on the recovery teams get to work each day by driving west for 20 minutes on a two-lane road that begins at the outer edge of Miami’s suburban sprawl, climbing into a launch for a 15-mile trip down a canal, and then transferring to a fan-driven airboat for the final 300 yards.

Then comes the search itself.

“A hand, floating in the water, a digit, bits of flesh, a scalp,” said Mark Siegel, a 43-year-old Metro-Dade County marine patrol reserve officer, in recalling a partial inventory of what he has recovered. Siegel has spent 14 days wading through the debris at the crash site.

“We knew from the first day we went in that we were not going to save anybody,” Siegel said. “We were told there would not be whole bodies. Still, this is traumatic.”

“It’s hard to explain how devastating this was, how horrible,” said Sgt. Art Serig, who has 23 years on the Miami police force. “When you are walking out there, through this root system, there’s a suction from the mud that pulls at your thighs, almost trying to hold you down. The River of Grass is beautiful, but this is almost like it’s cruel too, wanting to hold you down.”

The Everglades, which extends over most of Florida’s interior from Lake Okeechobee south to Florida Bay, is a freshwater marsh, dotted with saw grass and woody shrubs, and underlain by a spongy layer of vegetation decaying into peat and muck.

On average the water is about mid-thigh to waist deep, and the footing is treacherous.

Although the Everglades is home to tens of thousands of alligators and poisonous snakes, and a police sharpshooter is assigned to the airboats ferrying the searchers to the crash site 300 yards east of the staging area on a levee, wildlife has not been a threat.

But heat and water contaminated by jet fuel, oil and the bacteria of decaying bodies are.

“There is a certain smell associated with death,” Eklund said. “It permeates you; you can’t get it out of you. The totality of this experience--it’s something that just doesn’t seem real.”

Working in teams of five or six, each searcher who enters the water is outfitted in a white, disposable biohazard suit, made of a lightweight material impermeable to water. Each searcher also wears three pairs of gloves, heavy rubber, waist-high wading boots, goggles, a surgical mask over his or her mouth, and a hat. The suit of each searcher is sealed with tape at the wrists and ankles.

“It’s like walking in a plastic bag,” Siegel said. The recovery team members must step carefully through the fibrous peat while trying to keep the contaminated water from flowing over the chest-high top of their waders.

There is little shade in the Everglades, where the normal temperatures now top 90 degrees, and the water and humid air serve to magnify the sun’s intensity. “You are huffing and puffing through the mud and the saw grass, and you’re constantly hyperventilating through the mask,” said Metro-Dade diver Paul Toy, 47. “A lot of guys get lightheaded.”

The rainy season has begun, and late afternoons are frequently punctuated by powerful thunderstorms. Lightning detectors have been installed on the levee to warn searchers that a storm is approaching.

At first the searchers were limited to 20 minutes in the water, trudging through the muck in grid patterns. Some now pull shifts of 45 minutes or more.

When they come upon small pieces of the aircraft--and shoebox-size pieces are scattered everywhere over a 600-foot arc extending out from the main crater--the divers pick them up and walk them to the airboat, where they are tagged and recorded. Sections of the plane too big to pick up are marked with flags.

Body parts are also taken to the airboat, where workers from the medical examiner’s office take photographs, attach identification tags, seal the remains in plastic bags and put those bags into larger red bags. Through the day those red bags are shuttled by van to the medical examiner’s office in Miami.

The searchers also come across personal effects.

“Suitcases, fanny packs, pictures,” said Sgt. Steve Medley, 44, of the Fort Lauderdale police dive unit. “On Sunday I found two photo albums. That personalizes things, gives faces to this.”

After leaving the water, searchers travel by airboat to the levee for decontamination that includes being hosed down with a mixture of water and bleach, and several scrubbings with soap and water.

Only then, stripped of the biohazard suits and down to shorts and T-shirts, can the searchers get a drink of water or Gatorade.

Between shifts in the water, the divers spend about two hours on the levee, at first in two buses left idling so the air conditioning was on. Now there is an air-conditioned mess tent, where the American Red Cross serves up three meals a day, along with cold drinks and snacks.

On most days, the divers are assigned no more than two shifts in the water. “After that,” said Siegel, “you are exhausted. No one asks to stay in longer.”

Psychologists have been assigned by local officials to spend time on the levee, to be available to the searchers as they cool down between shifts in the water. But few, if any, of the police officers ever ask to speak to a counselor.

“We condition ourselves for dealing with death,” said Sgt. Joe Eakins, a member of an eight-person dive team from Palm Bay, Fla., which spent seven days working the crash.

During the first few days after the crash, some of the divers would show up with the morning newspaper to read while they awaited their shift. But Toy, for one, cautioned his colleagues against reading news accounts of Flight 592, especially those which included photographs of the victims.

“When you’re out there finding clothing, toys, things like that, you don’t want to see their pictures,” added Metro-Dade police Sgt. Daniel Llano, 37.

Eklund said he has coped with the strain of his shifts on the recovery detail by escaping last week to the Cayman Islands for recreational scuba diving. He said he had no hesitation about flying.

But on his return to Florida, as the airplane began its descent into Miami International Airport, he passed right over the crash site. “That bothered me,” he confessed, “because now I realized the extent of what happens.

“I thought about what I had seen down there. I didn’t lose my composure. But I did think about what I had seen.”