Response
The airport had no functioning firefighting equipment. The initial crash response involved several international agencies present in Goma, including several organisations of the United Nations (MONUC, Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, UNICEF, World Health Organization) and also Médecins Sans Frontières France and the International Red Cross. Members of the 6th Battalion of the Sikh Light Infantry, Indian Army, who were posted there as part of the North Kivu Brigade of the UN Mission in Congo (MONUC), swung into action to effect a rescue of 6 survivors and retrieve 18 bodies. Indian Army personnel were also involved in initial crowd control and preventing the fire that arose from spreading to thickly populated areas nearby. Both flight recorders were recovered.
One Kinshasa paper, Le phare, reports that airports throughout the country are still using fifty-year-old infrastructure from the Belgian colonial era. Two days after the crash, the DRC government committed to making the runway repairs neglected since January 2002. A local human rights organization laid the blame on the DRC government:
| “ | La responsabilité du crash d’un DC 9 de la compagnie Hewa Bora Airways le 15 avril dernier à Goma est d’abord imputable au gouvernement congolais, selon le Renadhoc, Réseau national des organisations non gouvernementales de droits de l’homme en RDC. (The responsibility for the crash of a Hewa Bora Airways DC 9 on 15 April in Goma, lies completely irrefutably with the Congolese government, according to Renadhoc, the National Network of Non-Governmental Human Rights Organisations in the DRC.) -Radio Okapi 2008-04-21 |
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The German government sponsored a €15 million, three-year project to rehabilitate the 1100 m of buried runway following the Hewa Bora crash, but that work had been suspended when another aircraft, operated by CAA (Compagnie Africaine d’Aviation) overran onto the lava in November 2009.
Read more about this topic: Hewa Bora Airways Flight 122
Famous quotes containing the word response:
“From time to time I listen to what you are saying, just in case a response is needed.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Because humans are not alone in exhibiting such behavior—bees stockpile royal jelly, birds feather their nests, mice shred paper—it’s possible that a pregnant woman who scrubs her house from floor to ceiling [just before her baby is born] is responding to a biological imperative . . . . Of course there are those who believe that . . . the burst of energy that propels a pregnant woman to clean her house is a perfectly natural response to their mother’s impending visit.”
—Mary Arrigo (20th century)
“There is ... but one response possible from us: Force, Force to the uttermost, Force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)