Rescue
Local commercial vessels from the NY Waterway and Circle Line Sightseeing Cruises fleets responded almost immediately to the emergency. NY Waterway ferry Thomas Jefferson, commanded by Captain Vincent Lombardi, was first on the scene arriving at the side of the plane just four minutes after the ditching. NY Waterway ferry Governor Thomas H. Kean, under the command of 20-year-old Captain Brittany Catanzaro, was the second rescue craft to arrive reaching the plane a few minutes later. Catanzaro reported to radio station WNYC that she and her crew used a Jason's cradle to facilitate people climbing onto the ferry. Aircraft captain Sullenberger stated in CBS News interviews that he advised the ferry crew to rescue passengers on the wing before the passengers in the inflatable slides, as the inflatable slides provided a higher level of safety. Time-stamped video from a United States Coast Guard (USCG) surveillance camera shows that the first of these vessels, a ferry boat, reached the plane at 3:35 pm (four minutes after the ditching) and began rescuing the 155 occupants. By this time many passengers were already standing on the wings or in the inflated slides. The slides eventually detached from the fuselage to form life rafts. At one point, as the plane moved in the strong ebb tide current, passengers on one of the slides, fearing that the stern of the ferry boat would crush them, had to shout to the ferry boat pilot to steer away.
Within minutes, vessels from the New York City Fire and Police Departments (FDNY and NYPD), the USCG, and a privately owned former Coast Guard Buoy Tender were on scene to help with the rescue and recovery effort. All of the passengers and flight crew were rescued safely.
The FDNY sent four marine units and rescue divers. On land, FDNY declared a level III (All Hands) emergency and mobilized their Major Emergency Response Vehicle, Logistical Support Units and had 35 ambulances ready for patients coming off the flight. About 140 FDNY firefighters responded to docks near the crash. The NYPD sent squad cars, helicopters, vessels, and rescue divers from the Aviation Unit and Harbor Unit.
In addition, about 30 other ambulances were made available by other organizations, including several hospital-based ambulances (St. Vincent, St. Barnabas). Various agencies also provided medical help on the Weehawken side of the river, where most passengers were taken. Two mutual aid helicopters responded to the West 30th Street Heliport, one from the Nassau County Police and another from the New Jersey State Police. New York Water Taxi sent boats to the scene but did not take part in the rescue.
Read more about this topic: US Airways Flight 1549
Famous quotes containing the word rescue:
“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.”
—Bible: New Testament, Matthew 6:9-13.
“To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“The individual woman is required ... a thousand times a day to choose either to accept her appointed role and thereby rescue her good disposition out of the wreckage of her self-respect, or else follow an independent line of behavior and rescue her self-respect out of the wreckage of her good disposition.”
—Jeannette Rankin (1880–1973)