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Heavy rains hamper search in Nigeria plane crash
Rescue workers search at the site of a plane crash in Lagos, Nigeria, Monday. PHOTO/Sunday Alamba/AP
A torrential downpour and strong winds prevented emergency crews from returning Tuesday morning to a devastated neighborhood where a commercial airliner crashed, killing all 153 people aboard the plane and an undetermined number of people on the ground.
The storm began Tuesday morning before dawn, flooding roads and bringing down power lines and trees in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city. Traffic crawled through the area, stopping searchers from returning to the site, said Yushau Shuaib, a spokesman for Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency.
Charred metal from the plane, rubble from destroyed buildings, thick mud and standing water await the emergency workers. A three-story apartment building at the site struck by the nose of the MD-83 aircraft began shaking Monday as rescuers dug through debris, and they are afraid it might collapse.
“It’s going to be messy,” Shuaib said.
The crash happened Sunday afternoon in Lagos’ Iju-Ishaga neighborhood, about nine kilometers (five miles) from Lagos’ Murtala Muhammed International Airport. Pilots on the flight from Nigeria’s capital Abuja to its largest city of Lagos radioed the tower that they had engine trouble shortly before the crash, but the exact cause remained unclear. The weather was clear at the time.
Late Monday, emergency workers recovered both the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, said Tunji Oketunbi, a spokesman for the Accident Investigation Bureau, which probes airplane crashes in Nigeria.
“We will take them for decoding and that will help our analysis,” Oketunbi said Tuesday. “We will know what happened to the aircraft shortly before it crashed.”
