USAir Flight 427 took more than the lives of 132 people aboard and the hopes of their grieving families. It cast a wide net of destruction, scarring the psyches of hundreds of others – close-call survivors like Pomrenke, rescue workers and eyewitnesses – who will never be able to forget the grisly calamity. And, according to trauma experts, many shouldn’t even try. The healing process, counselors say, begins when victims painfully confront the nightmarish particulars of a disaster. “The people who don’t are the people who tend to hit the bottle or hit their wives,” says Ellin Bloch, president of the Center for Trauma, Information and Education in Cincinnati. “A person needs to recount the experience in as much detail as possible, as many times as possible.”
Within an hour of the calamity, teams of counselors rushed to O’Hare and to the Green Garden Plaza shopping center in Aliquippa, a command post near the crash site. In Chicago, a handful of people – friends and relatives who had seen their loved ones off – met with a retired navy chaplain and mental-health workers from the American Red Cross. “Some need a hug, some need to talk, some need their solitude,” says Jane Felcan, a Red Cross disaster supervisor. “We listen, we let people tell their story.” But often they can’t articulate their grief. Two families who met the flight in Pittsburgh stayed the entire night in a state of shocked silence; a couple of Vietnam veterans, who were awaiting a friend from Chicago, could only express rage. After several hours of combing the wooded hillside for pieces of bodies, a 35-year-old firefighter sat down to a snack – and an emotional collapse. “I asked him how the pizza was and he started crying,” says Richard Boland, emergency medical services coordinator for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “You can only cope with so much.”
Acknowledging loss can be a brutal, if salutary, awakening. Some relatives might actually benefit by visiting the crash site. “They may need to have something tangible to help them grasp it, to touch the soil, to say, “This is real’,” says Denver psychologist Justin Schulz. Victims often have to work through feelings of guilt – from the “failure” to say a proper goodbye to the haunting series of “what-ifs.” But nothing can restore the vital, if illusory, sense of security that allows people to function normally and form trusting relationships. Survivors will have to forge a new – and more fragile – pact with life.
