At least 12 houses destroyed in New York crash inferno

9.00 am - By DAVID USBORNE

NEW YORK - Tom Mulvihll, a retired New York police officer, was at 9am mass at the Francis De Sales church in Belle Harbor this morning when he heard the bang.

"I thought it was an earth tremor," he said.

Others in the congregation thought a boiler had blown.

"Then we heard this woman outside the church screaming that the church school was on fire. All the men ran out of the church and we headed to the school," Mr Mulvihll said. "There was smoke and flames and houses on fire."

It was in their blood to run and see what the trouble was because this narrow peninsula on the Atlantic is heavily populated with fire and police officers from New York city, both active and retired.

And everyone has been on alert here anyway. When hijackers destroyed the World Trade Center two months ago, Belle Harbor lost 75 people. The school was not touched today. What Mr Mulvihll and his friends found was a charred and burning crater in their neighbourhood just beyond the school. They understood when they reached the Texaco garage.

"There was a huge part of a plane leaning against the gas truck and we just yelled to everyone to get out of there."

If New York City was dazed yesterday, contemplating scenes of carnage once again right in its midst, in Belle Harbor there was numb shock.

"I hate to say it, but it looks like the World Trade Center," said Audrey Pfeffer, one of the first people to reach the scene and a member of the State Assembly. "It was smoke and rubble and firemen on the rubble."

And, again, bodies. Bodies lying down the length of 131 Street.

"Frankly, the thing's fallen from the sky - that was the really horrible thing," said Anthony Weiner, a US congressman. He couldn't bring himself to describe the corpses of the passengers directly.

"The bodies were burned to a crisp, they looked like tar," said another witness at the scene.

Representative Weiner had been in the neighbourhood to attend a memorial service at the De Sales church. There has been one at the church almost every day for the last two months. There will have to be many more now.

"This is just a mammoth aftershock after the earthquake of 11th September," congressman Weiner said after visiting the site of the impact. "Just as people were returning to some kind of normalcy here, there is catastrophe again."

The echoes from the twin towers disaster were deafening, the phone lines were dead again, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was on the scene again, dressed in an emergency services jacket and baseball cap, talking to the media, conferring with city officials and touring the scene. Ruddy, wearing the same grim - but focused - expression.

And the emergency response was instant. Within minutes of the American Airlines plane hitting the ground, ambulances, fire engines and police cars were pouring into the area. For scores of fire fighters, however, the trip to the site was tragically short. They only had to come out of their front porches and walk down their street.

The area of devastation was relatively limited. The houses that were incinerated - about 12 in all - were really just in one neighbourhood block. Those not destroyed had windows blow out.

Aluminium siding - a favourite cladding in suburban areas like this one - had melted and become twisted. A fireman carried a mattress out from the rubble; it was only springs. The wadding and the material were all gone.

One of the airplane's two engines evidently fell from the plane a little earlier in its descent. It had come down in the back garden of 414 Beech 128th Street. At noon it was still lying there, lodged between the back of the house, its small one-car garage and a modest speedboat. The fan from the engine was visible from the street as well as the web of pipes wrapped around the engine's blackened casing.

The main house was intact but all its windows were blown out. The family had escaped. A stuffed scarecrow made of straw and a bedsheet was propped on the front steps, left over from Hallowe'en. On the small patch of grass out front stood a garden gnome holding an American flag, presumably placed there after 11th September.

This is the difference from two months ago. This is not the financial district of Manhattan but a family neighbourhood.

"When people move to Belle Harbor, they usually stay for the next 60 years," said John Cunneen who lives five blocks from the crash site. Houses are known here not by their street numbers but by the name of the family inside. Often they are Irish or Italian. Some houses keep those names even after the families have left.

Nobody could say what happened aboard that plane. Everyone was asking, of course. Was it mechanical or was it the evil fruit of another terrorist plan? Either way, for everyone it was hard.

"That this should happen now is really, really difficult to take," said Mr Cunneen. He was speaking beside the petrol tanker that was struck by the plane. Bits of metal from the aircraft, painted in the same green you see inside the fuselage, were lodged in its rear bumper.

"We even have plans for what happens when a plane comes down but we never thought it would actually happen," said Ms Pfeffer. "Everyone is in shock," she said. "Everyone in the community is just saying 'My God not again'."

She was standing by the De Sales church, a facemask around her neck. The smell of smoke was familiar but it was more acrid than the smoke from Ground Zero. Just two blocks away, aircraft fuel was still burning.

"There were just piles of debris and sheer incineration," said Glenn Riddell, a retired officer of the courts. "It just bring backs all those memories. Here is an airplane crashing into some buildings and we don't know why. It really shakes you up. I saw this tree there and it was nothing anymore - just a charred trunk."

They have been grieving in this neighbourhood for so many who died on 11th September. Among them were firemen and police officers who rushed to the Twin Towers to give help only to be crushed themselves. Others, however, had worked at the World Trade Center. "We had a lot of lads around here in Cantor Fitgerald," Mr Cunneen noted, referring to the brokerage house that lost more than 600 employees on that day.

Belle Harbor, on the southern edge of Queens where it meets the ocean, is on the Rockaway Beach Peninsula. It is mostly a blue-collar area and tight-knit. In some ways it mirrors the community that used to work in the World Trade Center. There was little pretension about the people who worked in the towers. And there is little pretension in the Rockaway area of New York. Now, they are both sites of awful grieving.

- INDEPENDENT

* The New Zealand Herald will publish a special edition today with updated coverage of the New York city plane crash. This special edition will be on sale in Auckland and main provincial cities at midday.

Complete coverage

Map of crash area

American Airlines information (from within NZ):
0168 1 800 245 0999