Decisions after DCA crash made mission more dangerous and traumatic, some first responders say

As firefighters and police divers scanned the icy water the night of the plane crash, D.C. firefighter technician Chris Finelli remembers an unusual sight amid the wreckage.

“What’s this figure skate doing at the bottom of the Potomac?” Finelli, who manned a boat for DC Fire & EMS, recalled. “I couldn’t figure out why [there was] a shiny, white, girl’s figure skate.”

He’d later learn that skate almost certainly belonged to one of the 67 victims – many of them young figure skaters – of the midair collision between American Airlines Flight 5342 and an Army Black Hawk helicopter.

As the gravity of who those people were came into view that night, so did the heart of first responders’ mission: to return them to their families quickly and in the most dignified way possible.

But a year after the crash, several first responders told the News4 I-Team decisions made during the operation made that harder to do, and that they didn’t have all the equipment they needed.

They told News4 they’re speaking out now because they want the District to be better prepared should the unthinkable happen again.

“I want their families to know that we did treat them with the utmost respect. Everyone that was hands-on did that,” said now-retired DC Fire Lt. Robert Alvarado. “We did everything we could with the limited resources we had […] but it shouldn’t have been done that way.”

‘We wanted them to be treated properly’

As rescue crews from all over the region descended onto the Potomac immediately after the crash, National Transportation Safety Board records show many first responders set up what’s called a casualty collection point at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport’s North Boathouse – located just a few hundred yards from the crash site.

There, interviews from NTSB records show, emergency personnel took as many as 19 bodies, wrapping them in sheets and quickly transferring them out of public view.

“You could see it. I mean, the airport was lined with flashing lights because they had so many resources over there,” Finelli said.

D.C. Fireboat Marine Pilot C.J. Isbell said that location meant emergency responders could quickly transfer victims from their boats to the shore.

“It was working seamlessly,” he told News4.

But then – a change.

Shortly into their rescue mission, Finelli said, they received “a call to hold all recovered.”

For reasons that weren’t clear to many first responders that night, the plan for receiving victims at the airport was abandoned once DC Fire took the lead in the response.

Instead, first responders were told to take recovered victims a mile and a half up a partially iced Anacostia River near the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge.

NTSB records show and multiple firefighters told the I-Team they raised concerns about the change, but “the recommendation from our unit was not followed,” Isbell said.

Soon after the change was made, Alvarado said he arrived to the new site, a concrete slab near a construction materials company and a helipad used by the Metropolitan Police Department. He told News4 he was shocked at what he found there.

Several first responders told the I-Team they also didn’t have body bags on D.C. fire boats – something D.C. leaders acknowledged to News4 this month.

That became a crucial problem, first responders say, because taking the victims up the river to the new location made the trip exponentially longer and more difficult.

Because their boats couldn’t easily reach the concrete slab, with many too low to step from a boat to shore, first responders had to move the bodies from one boat to another and up over their heads in order to get them on shore – some of it in full view of a television camera set up in a nearby apartment building.

“Dignity is invaluable, and we felt, me and my guys, like personally responsible for these loved ones. Like we were responsible for them and we wanted them to be treated properly,” Alvarado said. “I didn’t want to pick up someone’s child and put them on a piece of concrete. I didn’t want to do that.”

Finelli, a treasurer with DC’s fire union, said: “The No. 1 issue we’ve had with our members is their overwhelming exposure to this tragedy and that exposure could have been mitigated if there was better planning and decision-making.”

DC’s fire chief responds

DC Fire Chief John Donnelly, who served as incident commander in the mission, said he knows that night left a mark on first responders across the region.

“These people were exposed to horrendous trauma as first responders,” he said.

But he said he had to make the tough calls based on the information he had and mission he had to carry out. Asked about moving the location where first responders should take the bodies, he said he did so to make sure D.C. had a quick and accurate count of recovered victims. He said the airport was not a long-term solution.

“We did a polling of the places on the river and the only place that we had access to with a shelter was the MPD hangar,” he said.

Donnelly has also acknowledged the site had many challenges, but pushed back on the idea that the victims’ dignity was compromised by those problems.

He also acknowledged first responders didn’t have body bags on their boats – something he said he wasn’t aware of at the time – but said he stands by the decisions he otherwise made.

“We got everybody identified in six days. We got all the families notified officially through MPD. Find me somebody else who would have been able to do that,” he said.

D.C. Fire offered mental health support to first responders immediately following the response and in the following months.

The firefighters told News4 that while they’ve been able to replace much of their contaminated gear from that night, they’re still waiting for body bags to be deployed to fireboats. When asked about that, Donnelly assured News4 D.C. Fire has an adequate supply department-wide.

Victims’ families flew in from across the country on Wednesday for a private memorial service at DAR Constitution Hall. It focused on the lives that were lost and first responders who were there when tragedy hit. News4’s Dominique Moody reports.

‘It was just not the right way to do it’

Several months into his retirement, Alvarado said he and his fellow first responders did the best they could with what they had.

“Every diver, every boat operator, every boat crew member, every member of one of the squad crews that got the smaller inflatable boats out there, everyone that was here at casualty collection for all the time they’re here gave their all,” he said.

But as he replays that night in his mind on a near-daily basis, he said he still worries it wasn’t enough.

“I want to say I’m sorry to the families because I just don’t, you know, it was just not the right way to do it,” he said.

News4’s Mark Segraves spoke with two first responders who spent days underwater after the Potomac River plane crash.