Yadram Shivwoudh, one of 157 passengers on the Caribbean Airlines flight BW 523 that skidded off the main runway at the Cheddi Jagan International Airport, Timehri on Saturday morning, yesterday recalled how he and his family along with other passengers walked around in the darkness for a while before they were rescued by relatives.
The still traumatised man told reporters while standing at the bedside of his mother at the Georgetown Public Hospital how he had to “fetch” his family members one by one off the wing of the plane in an effort to get them to safety.
He spoke to reporters during a visit to the three hospitalized passengers by Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Kamla Persad-Bissessar and several of her Cabinet ministers where she gave the female patients red roses.
Persad-Bissessar, who was also accompanied by Health Minister Dr Leslie Ramsammy and Foreign Affairs Minister Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, spoke to the patients individually. She wished them a speedy recovery and promised that the Trinidad-owned airline would do all in its power to assist them.
Emergency door
Shivwoudh, who travelled from New York to Guyana with his wife, daughter, mother, Juliet Shivwoudh and a niece for a two-week holiday in Berbice, recalled how he had opened the emergency door when the plane came to a stop since he was sitting closest to the exit.
“I wanted to get out, because we started to smell the fuel. We did not know if there was going to be an explosion or anything,” the man said.
“I had to get on the wing and I had to catch my family one by one,” he continued.
According to the passenger he was walking around “in the woods in the dark, there was nobody to help us, to guide us. Not we alone, more passengers, we were in the woods in the dark.”
Eventually, he said the bus that had gone to the airport to collect them arrived at the scene and picked them up and took them to the Diamond Diagnostic Hospital and there they got some medical assistance.
His mother was later admitted to the GPHC but was expected to be discharged yesterday afternoon.
‘Tumbling and
rumbling’
Noel Elliot, who might have suffered the worst injury of the 157 passengers – a broken leg, told reporters that it was the way the plane was “tumbling and rumbling” after it landed that alerted him to the fact that something was wrong.
“I remembered coming in…I know we were told we have fifteen minutes to land and I was looking me time only praying to land and then I heard the landing gear come down and it went back up. Then I heard it for the second time come…then the next thing I know I hear the plane touch down and it start roll and you know it was not the airstrip because you start to hear all this tumbling and rumbling and then the plane start to flip forward,” the man said as he lay in his hospital bed.
He said the plane then came to a stop and the interior turned black as the lights went out and someone opened a door and people started to jump.
At that point Elliot said he said to himself: “This is my last day, I thought that was the end of it.”
“I praise God and I praise people that help me too because I tried to come out of the plane and I couldn’t come out,” the man who was seated in the fourteenth row of the plane said.
“Two gentlemen lifted me out, but I don’t know who they are but one of them started to lift me but he could not have lifted me because he was in pain too and another gentleman took over,” he said adding that the man was also taken to the hospital.
The father of four, who boasted that he became a grandfather only on Monday, revealed that his mother had travelled on an earlier flight and was waiting for him at the airport. He is happy that she did not travel with him. He comes to Guyana every year and has always travelled with CAL and is not afraid to go back on CAL.
‘Thank God’
Twenty-year-old Nicolette Allen, who also travelled from New York, remembered that when the plane was about to land she was looking out the window and when it landed she said: “Thank God I reach safe.”
“The first drop that the plane made I was hit in the face and I was unconscious for a while and when I catch myself then is when I see everybody rushing to the front of the plane and I decided to get up, I felt for my bag but I couldn’t feel my bag,” Allen, who was expected to be released from the GPHC, said yesterday.
She said she hurried out and got out at the side of the plane on the wing but was scared to jump to the ground and had to be assisted.
“…a guy helped me to get down, because I was scared to jump as I didn’t know if it was water or what it was at the bottom.”
She finally jumped with the assistance of the guy but hurt herself as she landed.
“This girl was next to me and she held my hand and told me to run and that is when I run. I don’t know where I was going and this guy told me I was heading the wrong way and he lead me out to the airport. I then reach out and I saw my family, he held my hand and took me out.”
The still-terrified woman, who came to Guyana for a wedding and to participate in the Emancipation celebrations, said the young man who assisted her held her hand and led her to the terminal.
