At least 12 killed, others injured after a UPS plane crashes near the Louisville airport
Of the 12 victims, three are likely the three crew members who were on the flight when it crashed, with the other nine still unidentified.
Leirim Rodrigues was in the car with her husband when they witnessed a low-flying plane crash into a petroleum recycling facility and an auto parts store, resulting in a raging inferno seen from miles around.
(CNN) — A UPS cargo plane crashed shortly after taking off from the Louisville, Kentucky, airport Tuesday, leaving a fiery trail of destruction and a half-mile-long debris field. At least 12 people were killed after the plane crashed shortly after takeoff, Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg told CNN affiliate WHAS.
Of the 12 victims, three are likely the three crew members who were on the flight when it crashed, with the other nine still unidentified.
“At this point, there could be more confirmed fatalities,” Greenberg said, adding emergency crews have transitioned into the recovery phase of the response.
Mayor Craig Greenberg speaks at the Louisville Regional Airport Authority about the crash of UPS Flight 2796 on November 4. (Photo Credit: Jon Cherry/AP via CNN Newsource)
Staff at the hospital treating more than a dozen people injured in the fiery plane crash Tuesday have seen burns and shrapnel injuries, according to Dr. Jason Smith, CEO and chief medical officer of UofL Health in Louisville, Kentucky.
“We’ve seen blast injuries from the explosion itself,” Smith said in a news conference Wednesday afternoon. “We’ve also seen some shrapnel injuries, where flying pieces of debris have hit either bystanders or people in relatively close proximity to the accident.”
Hospital staff have also seen burn injuries ranging from severe to minor and have treated some people for smoke inhalation, according to Smith. The hospital immediately initiated a “disaster alert” following the crash.
Firefighters work to extinguish flames from a plane crash in Louisville, Kentucky, on November 4. (Photo Credit: WLKY via CNN Newsource)
“Over the course of the evening, we treated around 15 (people) across the different parts of our health care system from the incident itself,” Smith said.
Two of the 15 patients are in critical condition while 13 others have been discharged, hospital spokesperson Heather Fountaine said earlier.
A National Transportation Safety Board investigation team is on site at the crash location and has recovered the aircraft’s “black boxes” — the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder.
“We have identified the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder … As you can imagine, it’s suffered some heat, not intrusion, but heat around it,” NTSB member Todd Inman said at a Wednesday news conference. “These recorders are built for that.”
Black box recovery is critical, experts say, because the technology can point to what pilots were saying before a crash.
Airport surveillance footage shows the left engine of the UPS plane involved in the crash near Louisville, Kentucky, detached during takeoff, Inman said.
“We have viewed airport CCTV security coverage, which shows the left engine detaching from the wing during the takeoff roll,” Inman said during a news conference Wednesday afternoon.
The NTSB has not released the video.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear declared a state of emergency and mobilized the National Guard in an effort to quickly free up resources.
Search and rescue operations following Tuesdayay’s UPS plane crash will be limited Wednesday night, Gov. Beshear said, noting the death toll is only expected to go up.
“We are moving from a rescue to a recovery mode,” Beshear said. “We do not expect to find anyone else alive in the area.”
Officials are now prioritizing the safety of first responders, “Because if you walk through this debris field,” Beshear added, “It’s very easy for somebody to get hurt.”
Passenger flights to and from Louisville are now resuming, according to the airport’s website, but they are hampered by a major backlog of delayed flights from Tuesday night and only one runway currently in operation.
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