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
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