Responders Delivered Hope to SF Plane Crash Victims

July 14--That Saturday morning, before he fell from the skies into the worst jetliner disaster in San Francisco history, Elliot Stone woke up on cloud nine.

The night before, the Santa Cruz County man had become engaged. He and his new fiancee, Elena Jin, were heading home from an idyllic 10-day trip to South Korea. There the 25-year-old Stone, a martial arts instructor, earned a fourth-degree black belt and watched one of his students win a gold medal at a tae kwon do competition.

As Stone and Jin, 23, boarded Asiana Airlines Flight 214 in Seoul with six friends and relatives July 6, the main thing on their minds was future wedding bells.

The trip lasted 11 hours. Then, under placid blue skies, it was time to land at San Francisco International Airport.

"I looked out the window and thought, 'Hey, we're coming in a bit low,' " Stone recalled. "Then there was a boom, and the back end lifted up. I grabbed my girlfriend and thought, 'Whoa, we might die right now.' "

The boom and lift turned into lurching and bucking. Then screaming all around.

Stone looked into his fiancee's terrified eyes.

That's when the jumbo 777 airliner slammed into the tarmac.

It was 11:27 a.m.

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San Francisco police Officer Jim Cunningham was at the airport's private jet terminal, a few large buildings away from the runway, when he heard the terse report over his radio: "Code 33, plane down!"

The call came in from a K9 police officer. Walking his dog out on the airfield, he'd looked up just as the airliner's tail section clipped the rocky seawall at the edge of Runway 28 Left with a sharp crunching sound. The tail and wheel assembly sheared off, and then the rest of the plane smacked onto the asphalt and skidded forward in a tremendous roar of scraping metal, trailing sparks and debris.

As it spun around and hit the weeds and dirt to the left of the runway, the craft's rear end heaved up like a fish fighting the hook. Then it slapped back to earth, finished its spin, and slid to a halt in an enveloping cloud of brown dust.

Cunningham jumped in his cruiser and hit the lights.

Just around the corner, American Medical Response emergency medical technicians Karla Louie and Maleah Goodreau sat in their ambulance, waiting to transport a sick baby whose plane was delayed. Goodreau was on her smartphone looking for a restaurant where they could grab a quick lunch when Cunningham's car screeched up beside them.

"We had a plane crash!" he yelled. "We need you! Follow me!"

Goodreau fired up the ambulance and took off after him.

As they drove, Goodreau and Louie took a hasty inventory of supplies in their rig, sorting out what they'd need for victims of a plane crash: backboards, headboards, collars, mass-casualty triage kits, tourniquets, trauma shears, oxygen.

"Is this really happening?" Louie asked herself.

The answer came first in the rising smoke and dust in the distance. The horrific scene they came upon confirmed it.

Scores of the flight's 291 dazed passengers had already poured from the twisted wreckage on escape chutes or through gaping holes in the skin of the jet. Some lay bloodied in the scrubby grass groaning, their backs broken. Others limped away from the plane nursing fractured bones, the least injured helping the least able. A stench of fuel and burnt grass filled the air, and flames were growing at the ends of the plane.

Perhaps the oddest thing was the near silence. Children and adults alike stood and stared, apparently not quite comprehending what had happened. Flight attendants from the crew of 16 were stationed by evacuation chutes, quietly shepherding passengers away from the plane. Only the sporadic moans of the injured punctured the air.

But the relative quiet was deceptive. A fountain-like spray of jet fuel was spewing into the dirt from beneath one of the two wings, somehow still attached to the craft despite the violence of the crash. A potential explosion was on the minds of everyone who saw it.

"There were people scattered all over the place," Cunningham said. "We get to the bottom of the chutes, and we see the jet fuel pouring out like a hose at the bottom of the plane. We yell at the firefighters to let them know, and we look up, and the crew is asking us for our knives."

He and another officer tossed up blades, and crew members began cutting passengers loose from their seat belts.

As the early responders worked, emergency crews from all over the Bay Area began arriving in a long caravan of ambulances, police cars and fire rigs streaming off Highway 101. As they pulled in, some attacked the growing flames, others triaged the most badly hurt, and others shepherded the uninjured into the airport.

No one knew how many who'd been aboard were still alive -- just that they had to work fast before the flames and jet fuel could make the tragedy worse.

For Cunningham, that meant dashing up one of the chutes and into the plane.

Inside was catastrophe.

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Elliot Stone couldn't believe he was still alive. In the terrifying seconds while the plane skidded and bounced like a carnival ride, Stone and those around him felt their heads slam into the ceiling. Their seats splayed back and forth like a deck of cards being fanned. Luggage spewed from the overhead compartments, smashing into people like missiles.

Each lurch of the jet caused more injuries: Ribs and chest bones cracked as they slammed into seat backs. Internal organs compressed by seat belts ripped and bruised. Spines snapped, heads concussed as they banged into walls or seatmates.

When the plane finally stopped moving, Stone looked behind him from his seat in the middle of the plane. A ragged hole yawned where the tail section used to be, and three flight attendants had been thrown through it onto the runway. Sitting here is what saved me, he thought.

As owner of the Elite Martial Arts Academy in Scotts Valley (Santa Cruz County), Stone was used to being in charge. And disciplined. He could see it was time to act.

"We stood up, and I had my iPod in one hand and my computer in the other, and then I heard, 'Fire!' " he recalled. "I looked ahead of me, and 10 rows up there was fire starting. I just dropped everything, and we ran out."

Stone's group surged toward the back of the craft, where a small fire was building but the smoke didn't appear to be as bad. Six of them clambered through a gaping gash in the right rear of the fuselage, picking their way through rubble and luggage to reach the ground. Two others slid down an escape chute on the left.

One by one or in groups, others followed suit, helping the injured as they went. Wen "Kitty" Zhang of China, 34, carried her 4-year-old son through a hole in the back, carefully protecting his broken leg. Cabin manager Lee Yoon Hye, tears streaming down her face, carried several passengers out on her back before realizing she'd broken her tailbone.

Just after the crash, an order had come from the cockpit to delay evacuation. But when Hye and her crew saw the flames about a minute later, they followed standard protocol, aiming to offload everyone within 90 seconds.

Like Stone, though, most passengers hadn't waited for instructions.

"I was extremely impressed by everybody," he said. "The flight crew were doing a good job getting people down the chutes ... and outside there were a whole lot of kids standing around with their parents. But they were not teary-eyed. They were just standing with their parents calmly."

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The first fire engine rolled up to the wreck two minutes after the crash. Its crew was already dousing the blazes and sorting victims by the time Goodreau and Louie's ambulance arrived moments later. Instinctively, they went to work, triaging passengers by dividing them into groups according to their injuries.

They spread out colored mats in the dirt away from the airliner. Green was for minor injuries, yellow more serious, red for critical.

"I've never seen that many people in pain," Louie said. "But even though they were in pain, they weren't screaming or crying."

The injuries ran the gamut: burns, broken bones, blunt force trauma and back pain. Some people couldn't walk. The pair went through more than 100 triage marker tags, then asked other crews for more.

Most of the passengers spoke only Chinese or Korean, but language was hardly a problem. A reassuring touch, a look in the eyes -- "We got our point across with no trouble," Goodreau said.

Trying to tend to more than 300 people at once became chaotic at times.

One of two 16-year-old Chinese girls who died at the scene, Ye Meng Yuan, was run over by a fire truck as her body lay outside the plane. Investigators are still trying to determine if she was already deceased. The other girl, Wang Lin Jia, was also found outside the plane, more than 500 yards behind it near the seawall, not far from the tail section and the three ejected flight attendants. Some passengers in the same area said they waited so long for aid they began using their cell phones.

"The first responders did a good job and they were moving pretty fast ... (but at the time) we were yelling, yelling, yelling, but couldn't get any of the emergency responders to come over and help," said Stone, who was helping the injured there. "We finally called 911."

Fire spokeswoman Mindy Talmadge would say later the delays were a matter of crews having their hands full in a widespread scene.

San Francisco police Lt. Gaetano Caltagirone was shoving debris away from the back of the plane when he spotted a woman with dried blood on her nose and mouth on the grass. Next to her were a brother and sister, about 10 or 11 years old, who didn't know where their parents were.

The girl had just one sock and shoe on; the boy had none. Both struggled to walk on the rocky field next to the runway. Caltagirone put the girl on his back and picked up the boy, carrying them from the plane to the transport area.

"The little girl started to cry because she thought the plane was going to explode," he said. "I just kept saying, 'It's going to be OK. It's going to be OK.' "

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While the rescue efforts continued, the fire on the broken plane got worse. It was nearly noon, and some passengers were still inside.

So was Jim Cunningham.

As he'd crossed the threshold at the top of one of the plane's escape chutes, two firefighters had scrambled toward him from the cockpit area. They wore air masks; he had none. But the smoke was beginning to build, and he could see people still aboard, including a man stuck between two battered seats.

"We started yelling for backboards, and we're all trying to help each other," he said. "I just remember doing a million things at once. The hardest part was we couldn't put our feet on the ground. It looked like a hurricane went through."

He and other officers who joined him tried unsuccessfully to get the Asiana flight attendants to leave. "They wanted to stay with the plane," Cunningham said.

To reach those deeper inside, they started flinging debris from the aisles and clearing the hole in the back of the airliner. It was getting harder to breathe, but within minutes Cunningham and his impromptu team pulled out three passengers, including two who couldn't move.

By chance, San Francisco fire Lt. David Brown found a fourth passenger in the jumble. Rushing in through the left rear door of the plane, he was about to step down when he spotted movement.

"I saw a leg," he said. "There was a woman under the debris, fighting and wiggling, but her torso was just pinned. It was amazing she was alive."

She would be the last passenger to leave the plane.

Outside, the first of the army of 80 ambulances that had raced to the scene began dashing away with the most seriously hurt.

"I couldn't believe the line of emergency vehicles," said emergency medical technician Vince Warren. "We just waited one after the other to go in. Load them up, get out of there quick, and get to the hospital -- two in each ambulance."

In all, 181 people were injured and went to 11 hospitals. Sixty-seven of them, 10 in critical condition, were ferried to San Francisco General Hospital, the main trauma center closest to the airport.

In its 125 years, S.F. General had never handled quite this kind of load.

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It was supposed to be a quiet day, a Saturday in the middle of a holiday weekend.

But already that morning, Dr. Margaret Knudson, S.F. General's chief of surgery, had patched up victims of a two-story fall, a shooting and a stabbing. Then a call came in around noon saying something was wrong at the airport. A staffer mused: It's probably just a cargo plane with few passengers.

Then came a text from the head emergency room nurse: "This is real. There are casualties." Knudson scarfed down a PowerBar, threw off the white jacket she wore over her scrubs and ran downstairs.

By the time she reached the emergency room, the first cases were coming in the door:

Two women, covered in road rash from head to toe, with internal bleeding and a bevy of other internal injuries.

A woman who had been crushed by an escape chute that mistakenly deployed inside the plane. Her face was so swollen from the heat and impact of the chute that doctors had to cut her a new airway.

More kept arriving: back fractures, a head injury, a little boy with a broken leg -- it seemed to never end.

Knudson felt herself pull up short. She'd seen scenes like this before, but those were in Iraq, where she'd worked with the military as a civilian surgeon in the war zone.

"I had a quick moment," she said. "But you take a deep breath, count your pulse, then go to work."

She spent four hours on just one case: moving a crash victim's stomach out of her chest, repairing her intestines, stemming her internal bleeding and sewing her ripped diaphragm back together.

As she worked, other doctors, nurses and support staff began rushing in. Soon the usual emergency room crew had doubled to 50.

The surgeries and the sleeplessness went on for days. S.F. General usually runs two operating rooms; in the days after the crash, it ran five. An astonishing number of those treated were released fairly quickly. By week's end, one more death joined the toll of fatalities -- another young girl who died in intensive care -- but just six other patients still needed surgery or more recovery time.

For Knudson, the quiet day that became anything but had become the ultimate test.

"That first day, I slept from 4 a.m. to 6 a.m., and then I started all over again. We all worked like that.

"I am very proud of this hospital."

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With the passengers and crew evacuated, SFFD Lt. Brown's team and the others got the airliner's flames knocked down by early afternoon. When a call came to check out a smoke alarm set off at the airport rental car center by an employee making popcorn, Brown's truck actually responded.

Soon, the emergency responders faced a new set of challenges: the post-adrenaline emotional crash, feelings of pride mixed with what-ifs. Federal investigators will take up to a year to determine why the plane's South Korean pilots brought it in so fatally low and slow, but for those who handled the crisis on the ground, those are tomorrow's problems.

Brown hasn't been able to shake a nagging sadness about the teenage girls who died. "It's funny, people always remind you of the ones that you saved, but you never forget the ones that you lose," he said. "I have a son that's 16 years old. I can't imagine what the families are going through."

EMTs Goodreau and Louie left the airport late that afternoon, then wound up triaging more victims at UCSF. Later, Goodreau found herself back at the crash scene -- in a nightmare where she was all but helpless. Days later, another nightmare had her upcoming flight to Seattle crashing with her aboard.

"Talking about it has really helped," she said, "but I'm also just ready to stop talking about it."

Back in China, the families of the dead girls mourned at candlelit ceremonies and planned funerals. Many survivors abandoned their U.S. vacation plans, returning to Asia as soon as they were discharged.

Elliot Stone's martial arts team and family bunked together and talked all night, agonizing over what they had seen -- and what could have been.

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Jim Cunningham wasn't ready to talk that afternoon, or even that night.

After spending hours at the crash site, he returned to his police station, finally leaving at 7:30 p.m. He walked into his home in the city's Parkside neighborhood still reeking of jet fuel and smoke. He picked up his 18-month-old daughter, Ashlyn, for a quick hug before his wife, Roberta, demanded he take a shower.

"Best shower ever," he laughed.

Cunningham's wife asked about what had happened, but he didn't want to go into it. Instead, with his daughter on his lap, he watched a few episodes of "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse."

When her bedtime came, he took her up to her room. He turned off the lights and turned on her mobile.

Cradling Ashlyn in his arms, he paced the length of the dark room, inhaling her clean scent as she sucked on her pacifier. It was quiet, the music from her mobile tinkling gently as she gazed up at him.

He gently carried her to a rocker, sat down and, for the first time all day, closed his eyes.

Kevin Fagan and Vivian Ho are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. E-mail: kfagan@sfchronicle.com, vho@sfchronicle.com

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