LAGOS, Nigeria – A torrential downpour and strong winds prevented emergency crews from returning this morning to a devastated neighborhood where a commercial airliner crashed Sunday afternoon, killing all 153 people aboard the plane and an undetermined number of people on the ground.
Some U.S. citizens were aboard the flight, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said, but he could not provide a firm number. A woman from West Hartford, Conn., her husband and four young children died on board the flight.
Today’s edition of the Hartford Courant newspaper identified the family as Maimuna Anyene;, her Nigerian husband, Onyeke;, and their children, a 5-month-old, 1-year-old twins and a 3-year-old.
The Houston Chronicle reported today that the crash also killed Josephine, 23, and Jennifer Onita, 28, sisters from Missouri City, Texas. According to the newspaper, family members said the women were in Lagos to attend a wedding.
Others killed in the crash included at least four Chinese citizens, two Lebanese nationals and one French citizen, officials said.
In Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, the storm began before dawn this morning, flooding roads and bringing down power lines and trees. 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.
The crash happened in Lagos’ Iju-Ishaga neighborhood, about 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 abroad for decoding and that will help our analysis,” Oketunbi said Tuesday. “We will know what happened to the aircraft shortly before it crashed.”
An investigator from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board also is expected to join Nigerian authorities today to help them determine a cause for the crash, Oketunbi said.
By nightfall Monday, searchers with police dogs recovered 137 bodies, including those of a mother cradling an infant, according to Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency. Rescuers acknowledged they don’t know how many people died in the wrecked apartments and smaller tin-roofed buildings along the narrow streets of Iju-Ishaga.
President Goodluck Jonathan wept as he visited the crash site Monday and pledged to make air travel safer, but the crash called into question the government’s ability to protect its citizens and enforce regulations in a nation with a history of aviation disasters.
Boeing said in a statement on its website that the company is ready to provide technical assistance to the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority through the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. Dana Air said an investigation was under way with U.S. officials assisting the Nigerian government.
Nigeria, home to more than 160 million people, hasn’t had a major airline crash in recent years. On
