It might’ve been a helicopter, Christopher Smith thought when he noticed the 911 call.
“We have helicopters moving around and aircraft moving around all the time up there,” Smith recalled last week. “That’s nothing new.”
But as Smith, a lieutenant with the D.C. Fire Department and assistant chief for the Falmouth Volunteer Fire Department, sat on the couch in his King George County home and gleaned information about a crash from two different 911 cellphone apps, he didn’t think it was going to be a large incident.
He ended up being right about the helicopter — but wrong about the scope of destruction.
The Jan. 29 crash, in which an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided with an American Airlines passenger jet, resulted in the worst emergency scene he’s experienced in 25 years as a Washington, D.C., firefighter. Worse, even, than what he saw at the Pentagon on 9/11.
“It was, it was very overwhelming,” he said.
Smith was one of at least two Fredericksburg-area first responders who helped in the aftermath of the crash, which took the lives of all 67 people on board both aircraft.
Smith initially heard that a D.C. fireboat was on the scene outside Reagan National Airport, and that emergency personnel had found a plane wing and crash victims in the Potomac River.
At the same time, in a group chat with fellow fire divers, his peers began wondering what they should do.
“And I basically just said, ‘Let’s just go back to work,” said Smith, “and then we got officially told to come back to work.”
So the 51-year-old father of four got on the road to the accident scene. A member of the D.C. Fire Department’s dive team, Smith knew to go to the U.S. military’s Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling because its Capital Cove Marina would be the closest to the incident site. He also knew all the pertinent landmarks — including the location of Runway 33, the path American Eagle Flight 5342 was supposed to land on.
Smith, who began fighting fires with the Falmouth department 35 years ago, was one of 14 divers from the D.C. department, and he was joined on scene by police and emergency professionals from around the Washington D.C., area.
He first got in the river about 10:45 p.m. and basically dove all night.
On his way into work, he expected there would be people who’d survived the crash.
He was 9 back on Jan. 13, 1982, when Air Florida Flight 90 struck the 14th Street Bridge connecting Arlington with Washington before crashing into the ice-covered Potomac. Seventy of the 74 passengers and four of the five crew aboard were killed along with four occupants of vehicles on the bridge.
But there were five survivors.
After arriving at the recent scene, though, Smith quickly discovered that no one would be walking away from it.
He and another fire department diver were the first ones to respond to the helicopter, and they recovered the crew chief, Staff Sgt. Ryan Austin O’Hara, 28, of Lilburn, Ga.
As heart-wrenching as that task was, he said, it did fulfill a goal of the mission: “If we cannot save the life, we’re going to provide closure for the family.”
Later, Smith would transition to recovering plane victims. From what he was told, those passengers would have died on impact. At least, in other words, they didn’t drown.
“As weird as that may sound, that’s comforting, you know, that it was like a light switch, I’m assuming,” Smith said.
Eventually, he would leave recovery work to assist crash investigators with finding aircraft parts. The investigation is ongoing, and the Black Hawk crew may not have heard an instruction from air traffic control to pass behind the jet, the National Transportation Safety Board said Friday.
Katie Brady, public information officer and Fire Life safety manager with Stafford County’s Fire and Rescue Department, also was part of the response.
As part of the National Capital Region Incident Management Team, Brady worked in a joint information center focused on tasks such as fielding media inquiries and putting together press conferences.
She stressed the need to coordinate information among the varying officials who are involved in the response.
“There’s a lot of different players, so making sure that all of the information is good among those different agencies that were involved,” she said.
Meanwhile, Smith and those on his shift were relieved about 5:30 the next morning by the Baltimore City Fire Department dive team.
They came back on duty at 7 a.m. Jan. 31 and continued to respond to the scene until Wednesday, when they were demobilized.
To keep themselves going, Smith said he and his colleagues kept their minds on the task at hand.
“Most people don’t make it very long [in that line of work] if they cannot stay mission-focused,” he said.
But, even as an officer, he admitted that the scale of the carnage was new for him, as well.
Even the largest metropolitan fire departments in the United States — such as those in Los Angeles or New York City — aren’t ready for something like last month’s crash.
“None of those entities are truly prepared for that,” Smith said. “You know, we just have to, we literally have to fall back on how we were trained and how we do our job, and, hopefully, you know, that gets us through it.”
The work is physically taxing, too. Divers’ suits protect them from the elements, which in this case included fuel and oils and heavy metals, but they didn’t eliminate one enemy: the frigid temperatures.
“I’ve been cold, but I’ve never been that cold,” Smith said.
The divers were also aided by technology teams, which he said comprised the unsung heroes of the operation. Together, they were able to use sonar to map underwater.
So, said Smith, “We kind of knew where things were.”
Though there were small victories, Smith said his agency will feel the effects of the response for a long time.
“It changed the landscape of our fire department, this incident,” he said.
