Chemistry of Fire Read online

  DOT Inspector General Mary Schiavo had sent her investigators to the FAA on February 7 to say that she wanted ValuJet inspected for its pattern of crashes and near catastrophes. Only recently, a ValuJet plane had burned to cinders on the runway, while another had suffered collapsed gear on landing.

  The FAA field office in Atlanta had immediately informed ValuJet of what Schiavo was doing. ValuJet sent a lobbyist to the chief of staff at DOT to quash the investigation. On February 16, the FAA’s own inspectors wrote an internal memo urging that ValuJet be grounded. But the memo was hastily buried by higher officials. An FAA employee anonymously called Schiavo, who immediately subpoenaed the memo. The FAA denied that it existed. In its 1996 Strategic Plan, the FAA had cited ValuJet as a model for the new era of airline transportation, the discount airline, the growth company, which others should follow. How would it look if they grounded their own model airline?

  Instead of grounding ValuJet, the FAA secretly made a gentleman’s agreement with the president of the company, Lewis Jordan. The FAA would perform a “white glove” inspection in lieu of grounding. It was done in secret to avoid publicity. In fact, the FAA quietly told ValuJet not to buy any more planes without their permission, because “it appears that ValuJet does not have a structure in place to handle your rapid growth, and that you may have an organizational culture that is in conflict with operating to the highest possible degree of safety.” The public was allowed to see none of those behind-the-scenes machinations and went on flying on the cheap ValuJet tickets. People buy airline tickets the way they buy gasoline. Since they know nothing about either, they go for the cheapest deal.

  At the end of February, DOT Secretary Peña had a flight planned from Atlanta to Washington on Delta Airlines. He changed to ValuJet to support the airline and send a message to Jordan that he had nothing to worry about with Mary Schiavo. Peña was Schiavo’s boss.

  “On April 2, 1996,” Schiavo wrote, “the FAA advised my office that there was no pattern to the ValuJet accidents and incidents.” She did not know then that the FAA had already sent ValuJet a memo stating, “ValuJet is not meeting its duty to provide service with the highest possible degree of safety.”

  When Peña flew to the crash site almost immediately after the accident to announce that flying was safe—ValuJet was safe, everything was safe—he did not fly on ValuJet. He already knew what was wrong. After the crash, the FAA began spot checks of ValuJet and forced it to cut its flights from 320 to 160. Jordan made it seem as if it had been his decision, but it was the first step in the unraveling of the cover-up. It was well known among pilots that ValuJet flew roaches, and now the FAA was grounding plane after plane.

  On June 16, the FAA was finally forced—by Schiavo, by public outcry, and by its own investigators, astounded at what they saw—to ground ValuJet’s entire fleet.

  Peña and FAA administrator David Hinson closed ranks, firing Associate Administrator Anthony Broderick, who had been the point man with the press and was an easy scapegoat. David Hinson was a former senior vice president of McDonnell Douglas, which had manufactured the DC-9 that lay in pieces the Pit. He was a former executive at Midway Airlines. Mary Schiavo said, “There was no charitable way to characterize what they [Peña and Hinson] were doing—they were simply lying to the public about ValuJet’s record.”

  Early one morning the investigators went quietly out in an airboat before the search teams could disturb the mud and cloud the water. As they slipped silently along in the dawn, peering down into the dark water, they could see the trailing edge of the airplane wing wavering in the water, which had cleared as sediment settled through the night. And one of the investigators who knew said that he suddenly understood that all those people were down there, who had been reading a novel or holding a baby one moment and the next moment were shredded into chum and buried.

  Navy divers were brought in, along with special ground-penetrating radar and custom-made inflatable dry diving suits and experts of every sort to puzzle about how one company had made such a mockery of technology through its careless and ignorant use of it. More than the airliner was at stake here, more than ValuJet’s continued existence, more even than the 110 lives that had been lost. The way we understood our world was at stake. We had established a long-standing truce with the forces of nature. Science was our new religion, and the technology it had spawned had produced a whole new world and with it a new set of beliefs. Unlike religious cultures, which take fate for granted, we believed that science and technology had put us in control. These people, the Mud Stud and his cohorts, were taking charge of this swamp and in doing so were setting right a fundament postulate by which we all lived.

  The plan that had evolved concerning the Pit was that ground-mapping radar, hung on the side of an airboat, would scan the spot and produce a picture of the main wreckage of the McDonnell Douglas DC-9 where it supposedly rested like a sunken Spanish galleon. Then divers, wearing the custom-made dry suits, would descend into the Pit and assess the best way to raise the wreck. The previous day, a fragment of the captain’s flight bag had been found, buoying hopes that this was indeed the mother lode.

  There had been a lot of speculation about exactly how deep the mud was in the Pit. It was known that the Everglades sat on a limestone shelf that ran up to Lake Okeechobee. The bottom depth varied from place to place. In some places it was quite deep, perhaps as much as twenty feet. In others it was shallow. In order to swallow an old-fashioned DC-9, though, it would have had to be pretty deep. Moreover, the mud was not simply mud but Loxahatchee peat, a tangle of roots, vines, weeds, and other plant material, which over thousands of years had partly decomposed and woven itself into what some firefighters described as a kind of natural fiberglass. When a helicopter had lifted one of the mashed-up engines, the pull required had been four thousand pounds. When the peat had finally let go, the engine had weighed only two thousand pounds. So there was concern about how, once workers were actually down in the Pit, they would raise something the size of a DC-9—even a badly crumpled one.

  The only thing that no one expected was the thing that divers actually found. After ten days of waiting, everything was finally in place for the big dive. Paul Toy, a Metro-Dade Police diver, finally suited up and went down. Less than a quarter of the plane, by weight, had been recovered in bits and pieces by then. Not one adult victim had yet been identified from the bits of flesh brought back in bar-coded bags. So Toy was expecting to find a ruined aircraft hull housing a mass grave. He was tethered to another diver, who remained on the surface to help if Toy got in trouble down there. This was spooky stuff. Toy could get tangled in the miles of wire and never come back up. Nobody envied him his job.

  Toy descended and remained down in the Pit for an hour and a half. What he found was both a relief and a shock. The plane had cut a crater eighteen inches deep and about fifteen feet in diameter in the limestone bedrock beneath eight feet of water, mud, and peat. But Toy said afterward, “There is no aircraft in the pit. There’s no airplane left.”

  The airplane had flown at such a prodigious speed into a solid wall of limestone bedrock that it had simply disintegrated, and that black cloud seen by the only witness, the bass fisherman in Holiday Park, had actually been the entire plane, along with all its contents, as the swamp vomited it back into the air for one last flight. It had turned to not much more than vapor and dust. Then it had settled and vanished forever from the face of the earth.

  If you’ve ever lost someone you dearly love, you know this moment: after exhausted sleep has found you in your grief, has come on in twisted emanations like smoke and released you for a time from the rigors of emotional pain, that moment when you finally wake and lie in peace because you have not yet remembered the terrible thing that has happened, have not yet emerged from sleep far enough that the pain can grip and tear at you again. Sometimes it’s the only good moment of the whole day before the world comes crashing down again.

  ValuJet flew the families of the victims to
Miami and put them up at the Crown Sterling Suites hotel. It was an odd choice. For one thing, it was under the departure path of the jets, located in close proximity to the airport, making it impossible to forget even for a moment exactly why they were all there. Stranger still was the place itself.

  The interior was a hollow ten-story cylinder with glass elevators sliding silently up and down. New Orleans–style wrought iron railings curved around the floors in tiers all the way to the top, where an immense skylight sifted a celestial light down on the faux jungle at ground level. People at all levels up and down the inner stories came out of their rooms, ranked around as if in a panopticon, to stand at the rails and look down and out and away. Great fat Japanese carp swam in an artificial grotto below. A waterfall in the tropical jungle crashed too loudly. Pinioned ducks swam above the carp in the pond. A baby’s cry echoed in the tremendous hollow cavern.

  The impression of great height seemed most eerie, as if the place had been chosen as a reminder of a fall from great altitudes. And those who came to stand forlornly at the balconies were there to pay homage and symbolically to join their loved ones in the endless reaches of the sky, so effectively duplicated in the architecture of that eccentric basilica.

  Going up in the glass elevators was all vertigo. And the people leaning on the railings, high and small, as if in the clouds, appeared as saints in a heavenly hierarchy. It all seemed designed to replicate the flight, the fall, the last rushing roar, the final swallow of water as the glorious, delicate ship reached for its own reflection in the black and oily swamp and then turned instantly to hot mist and smoke and particles too small ever to retrieve. The FAA still says that airlines are the safest way to travel. But death has the last word.

  The families drifted in and out of the lobby, and a slope-shouldered priest in a Roman collar from the Catholic Community Services counseled a couple carrying a gift of yellow potted flowers. The man was tall and fit. He looked as if he drove a new car and lived in a sound suburb and played a fair game of tennis. He wore pressed khaki shorts and a belt and a golf shirt and good sport shoes. They all wore green ribbons given them by ValuJet that said “Flight 592,” as if there were some sort of twisted pride in giving your son or your mother or your sister to the cause.

  Because of the hotel’s proximity to the airport (and its corporate rates), the airline crews stayed at the Crown Sterling Suites, too, and while the relatives were ranged around the lobby, pilots and flight attendants in uniform hurried through with wheeled luggage on their way to another flight, past the sad faces, the flowers clutched too tightly, the empty stares under a turning Casablanca fan. And wreathed in the sounds of this false Eden, these people, as if from alien tribes, gaped in wide-eyed solemnity at one another across the lobby with its French-tile floors under heavenly light.

  A woman came out of the elevator weeping and greeted the priest. The man holding the yellow flowers hugged the weeping woman and then held her hand and continued to hold his potted flowers while they talked. “That plane was loaded with saints,” he told her. “Your brother is a saint. My wife is a saint.” And she wept some more, nodding in agreement.

  I watched the families posed in little groups, frozen in tableaux that seemed minute against the vast jungle of the lobby, just as their relatives were forever frozen like victims of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. I had tried more than once to imagine myself in that plane. I once heard a survivor of another crash say, “We held each other and said good-bye.” Now I felt certain that down in that weedy world were two people who had been seated together by chance (as this man in his golf togs and this weeping woman were together by chance), strangers who, at the last moment, with the full realization of the end upon them, had embraced and now were caught down there as if in amber, exactly like these relatives, these strangers, who here embraced in the sound of rushing water in the cavern of light that was this place, this cathedral for their grief.

  9

  Spring Opening

  I WATCHED RUSS LANDT in a yellow plastic hard hat walk back and forth in the snow behind the yellow bulldozer with no gloves, his battered boots soaked through. He was showing Steve Garrow how to make the first cut—the “pioneer cut,” as they call it—into virgin snow. On the fourth of June, the snow where we stood on Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park, Montana, was twenty feet deep. And that was the least of it. Russ’s broad, clean-shaven face was deeply tanned, and his big Germanic head sat nobly on his stocky frame as he nodded and observed, “Steve’s a good driver.” A high compliment from Russ, the only living human who really knows where the road is once it’s buried in snow. If Garrow didn’t hit it exactly right, he’d be sitting out there with nothing supporting that fifty-thousand-pound Caterpillar D-7 “Cat” but a big wet hundred-acre snowdrift.

  One of the things that made Steve good was that he remained calm. He had run four-man patrol boats for the navy in Vietnam and was shot twice for his trouble, so on the great scale of experience, this was not particular stressful to him. “They sank our boat,” he had told me. “I wouldn’t give that experience up for anything.” Each man up here had a story. Each one had shrugged off civilization and come a long, hard way to freeze in the middle of nowhere, doing exhausting and dangerous work for low pay and no benefits.

  I watched Garrow push big tumbling slabs of dirty spring snow into the cirque below. They would launch down the chute, gathering speed, and then explode on the rocks in puffs of smoke.

  In this world of GPS and smart bombs, it was difficult to imagine not being able to find an entire road. From a mile away, I could see it well enough on the huge mountain, a fine filament vanishing into the snowfield. But finding it up close with a plow blade had humbled many men and had killed some others. People still talk about the driver who went out a little too far one day in 1964. Twenty acres of snow let loose underneath him. The slab avalanche, as it’s called, cut right down to bedrock, snatching away trees and gobbling the machine up in one bite. The dozer rolled “seven complete rolls,” Russ said. He was right behind the Cat when it happened. “It made a sound just like a 30-06 rifle shot when it let loose,” he told me. “I was only three or four feet away from where it broke loose. There was no time to warn him.” The Cat had become airborne as it went down, vaulting, landing hard on the cab roof with a bone-crushing sound, then leaping again in torrents of snow. Like a child’s toy, it had disappeared in huge white breakers. Then everything was silent, and they could hear the crashing of McDonald Creek far below.

  Russ rushed down the hill and found an arm sticking out. “A miracle he was even alive,” Russ said. The first words out of the driver’s mouth were “Is the Cat hurt?”

  Russ said he’d seen fifty-seven avalanches come down in a single morning on the spot where we stood talking. “Lots of time we lose ground and have to retreat. They airlift us to the Cats in helicopters so that we could work our way back down.”

  Each year, as the plowing draws to a close, the park hosts an event called Show Me Day, in which the public is allowed to view the operation. Families, bicyclists, and hikers are led up the mountain to watch. This year a few days after Show Me Day, the Haystack Creek chute cut loose with a slab avalanche so big that it took out the road’s historic rock retaining wall and shot it down the valley like old coffee grounds. “We thought it was pretty safe up here,” Jim Dorman, the supervisor, told me.

  Every avalanche chute has a name. “We have to have a name for a place about every quarter mile,” Russ told me, “just so people can know where they are, in case something happens.” There’s Waterworks, Grizzly Chute, Crystal Point, and No Stump, just to name a few. There used to be a stump at a place called Old Stump, but somebody decided to remove it, so after that, the same spot was called No Stump. Tractor Gulch is a chute where a tractor mysteriously went backward between two rocks and over the edge one weekend, demolishing itself in the process. No one ever figured out how it happened. Probably ghosts.

  Avalanches aren’t the only
hazard. Coming up at the start of the day, another crew member, Steve Garrow’s brother Sean, drove into a fifteen-foot crevasse. As the dozer tipped over the edge, snow exploded through the windows. “Then you’re looking at two to four hours of cable pulling,” Russ said. “You’re looking at a straight drop-off and not much room to maneuver. We’ve fallen into three holes this year and broken out seven windows already.”

  The west-side operation, where we were, was the main operation for spring opening. Each year, it involves four pieces of equipment, two Cats, a rotary snowplow, and a loader with a custom-made bucket called a Bindle bucket, because it was welded up in one of the park shops by a man named Bindle. The seven-man crew is composed of three watchers and four operators. A smaller crew worked clearing the road on the east side of the park, and both teams aimed to meet at the Big Drift, just east of the highest point in the road, the Logan Pass Visitor Center. Big Drift could be under eighty or even a hundred feet of snow at times, and when the pioneer dozer went out on it for the first time, he would be performing an aerial act worthy of any circus, like floating a battle tank on a soap bubble. He would be nowhere near the road’s actual surface. If he came down wrong, say on the double yellow line, he could not go back up and start plowing again. From that first cut out to the cliff’s edge was all the space they’d have for road until the snow melted. That means that if he cut too wide, then when the road opened to traffic, there might be only one lane in that precarious spot, and crew members would have to stay up there to direct traffic. There would be a big traffic jam, a lot of angry tourists. It was a big deal. The perfect pioneer cut was therefore next to the inside wall, so the Cats could push all the snow out over the cliff and open both lanes to traffic. But cut too close, and the Cat would tip out and roll you down the hill.