A year ago Saturday, Carolyn Cross and Simon Pearce met in the cruelest of situations.
Pearce, a heroic passerby. Cross, trapped in a burning plane with six other passengers and two pilots on Russ Baker Way in Richmond, close to death.
“I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t move. I would not have survived without rescuers pulling me out,” Cross, the CEO of a biomedical company, told The Province.
“We were all threatened with smoke inhalation. I looked up and the whole side of the plane was engulfed [in flame].”
After Cross was pulled out, she saw the rescuers try to help again.
“They were going inside of a burning plane and I was just in awe and wanted to cry. I was elated and numb and in shock,” said Cross, who still suffers post-concussion symptoms.
All seven passengers were pulled out of the blazing wreck by the citizen rescuers. The two pilots — Luc Fortin and Mark Robic — were afterwards rescued by firefighters, but later succumbed to their burns.
Now Cross and Pearce are together again. This time, finding a way to help citizen first-responders deal with the emotional aftermath of accidents and tragedy.
Cross said that when the victims and rescuers were well enough to get together this past February, she noticed that some of them were suffering from living through a horrific incident.
“They could have used some help,” said Cross. “We were quite concerned.”
So she and Pearce put together a pamphlet for citizen first-responders on how to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder, which results in depression and isolation. The pamphlet is being released Saturday, to coincide with the anniversary of the accident.
Cross hopes the pamphlets will get into the hands of traditional first-responders, like police and fire fighters, so they can be given to people like those that jumped in to help that afternoon a year ago.
Traditional first-responders are trained to deal with trauma and getting counselling is readily available. The same isn’t true for the bystanders, who responded to Flight 204 before the Richmond fire department could.
Rescuer Shawn Nagurny admits to thinking about the accident “a lot.” He is reminded about it daily because he drives across the accident scene to get to his office, which is about 100 metres away.
“To this day, all four lanes you can see the burn marks,” said Nagurny, a director of marketing and business development for Shearwater Resort and Marina.
“I heard it first,” he said. “I turned around and saw the plane sliding in a big wall of flame and then it hit the centre island and that’s when it more or less exploded.”
Read more: http://www.globaltvbc.com
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