CAMEROON: Rescue workers struggle to cope with horrors of Kenya Airways crash site

Record ID: 455233

  • Title: CAMEROON: Rescue workers struggle to cope with horrors of Kenya Airways crash site
  • Date: 11th May 2007
  • Summary: FORENSIC EXPERTS EXAMINING BODY REMAINS
  • Embargoed: 26th May 2007 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Cameroon
  • Country: Cameroon
  • Topics: Disasters / Accidents / Natural catastrophes,Transport
  • Reuters ID: LVA9QJ3G961VMPOFRNRN1DSXMM6V
  • Story Text: Scores of Cameroon rescue volunteers are assisting with recovery and identification operations at the site of an horrific Kenya Airways crash site. But the experience has left many deeply affected.
    The search for victims of the Kenya Airways plane crash, which killed 114 people, has seen Red Cross volunteers struggling in knee-deep mud for days, in the hope of recovering bodies.
    The Boeing 737-800 crashed into densely forested swampland early on Saturday (May 5), soon after leaving Douala for Nairobi in torrential rain. It took emergency services two days to find the crash site. While many questions regarding the crash remain to be answered, Cameroonian rescue officials and scores of Red Cross volunteers have been working to recover victims' remains ever since.
    Rescue workers have had to hack through dense mangrove and forest to reach the wreckage as helicopters and planes buzzed overhead.
    The work is painstakingly slow. Rescuers struggling on foot, carry the remains wrapped in white plastic to a forensic camp set up on the edge of the forest.
    It is here that each part of the victims' remains is examined, in order to try and attempt to identify the body.
    "It is very difficult, very difficult, you see a person, like the first one we carried, you don't see their heads, you don't see their hands, you don't see their feet. You have just the trunk of the body, you put that on a stretcher, and don't even know who it is," said Eko Ekondo, one of the Red Cross volunteers who spent the last four days at the crash site.
    Unconfirmed reports from the crash site say that so far around 80 bodies have been recovered, but the gruelling task continues, as rescuers sieve through the wreckage to recover every little bit of information they can bring back from the site.
    The plane was found late on Sunday (May 6) in a mangrove swamp near Mbanga Pongo, only 20 km (12 miles) from Douala airport, after nearly two days of fruitless searches some 100 km (60 miles) away in southern Cameroon, where radar-equipped helicopters and villagers on motorbikes spent most of the weekend combing tropical forest.
    The intense heat in the West African country caused the bodies to decompose fast, creating a dangerous environment even for the rescuers recovering the bodies.
    For the volunteers, many of them at their first every crash site, this was a heart and gut-wrenching task. And while every effort was made to preserve the remains from the plane, efforts were also made to ensure the well-being of the volunteers.
    Psychologist Luc-Richard Kouoh Dipanda, who came to the site to assist the volunteers, said many of the volunteers had been deeply affected by what they found at the site. "This type of catastrophe only happens once in 10 years, there are people who go through all their lives without having to see this, it's difficult to stand. There are already a good number of staff who came to me to tell me that for two days now they have not been able to sleep, they re-live the horror of what they see here on the ground, so it's not easy to go through this," Dipanda said.
    Cameroon's Prime Minister, Ephraim Inoni, has ordered a formal government inquiry into the crash, which once again threw the spotlight on air safety in Africa, the continent with the world's worst record.
    The inquiry was expected to focus not only on why the plane, only six months old, came down in stormy weather, but also why rescuers took so long to find the crash site.
    Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki has declared Monday, May 14, a national day of mourning for the crash victims.
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