DISASTERS: A Calamitous Week

Calamities, natural and unnatural, struckalmost simultaneously in Europe and Asia last week:

> Storm clouds hung low over London’s Heathrow Airport when the”Eurocrat Special,” a British European Airways Trident jet with 118people aboard took off for Brussels. Four minutes later, the pilot,Captain Stanley Key, 51, radioed: “Up to 60,” a routine message askingfor permission to climb to 6,000 ft. He never made it. Suddenly, theplane plummeted to the ground and burst into pieces near a clump oftrees four miles from the airport, killing everyone aboard.

It was the worst air crash in British history. The “black box” flightrecorder, retrieved after the crash, revealed that the forward “droop”flaps that produce added lift on takeoff had been retracted much tooearly, which may have caused the plane to go into an irreversiblestall.

To comply with noise-abatement regulations, pilots must reduce powersettings at a moment in flight that is potentially hazardous becausethe aircraft is in a nose-up attitude and still climbing. A change indroop setting at this time can cause a stall. Normally, the adjustmentof the droop is made by the copilot, and Captain Key had two relativelyinexperienced copilots aboard. “It could have been that whoever wasadjusting the flaps pulled the wrong lever,” said a senior BEA pilot.

> Only two days before, a southbound train had entered one end of themile-long Vierzy tunnel 60 miles northeast of Paris, at the same timeas a northbound train roared in from the other end. Unknown to eitherengineer, part of the tunnel’s roof had fallen in. The two trains hitthe rockfall, which acted like a trampoline, hurtling them up to theroof at 60 m.p.h.; cars at the rear telescoped into a mass of tangledmetal. Rescue workers braved the possibility that more of the darkenedtunnel’s roof might collapse and worked with handsaws because of thedanger of explosion of diesel fumes. They took three days to pull 90injured passengers to safety and carry out 107 bodies. No one is surehow many corpses remain. The two trains may have carried as many as 400passengers when they entered the tunnel.

> In Hong Kong three days of torrential rains—26 inches in all, theheaviest downpour in 83 years—triggered a series of landslides thatkilled at least 100 people and left another 71 missing. The highestdeath toll was recorded in the Kowloon quarter, across Hong Kongharbor, where slides swept away a squatters’ village. Three buildingson Hong Kong’s Victoria Peak, where many of the colony’s most expensiveresidential areas are situated, were also destroyed. One twelve-storybuilding, with all its lights burning, seemed to tilt slowly before itplunged down the hillside like an ocean liner sinking at sea.Government officials worried about a potential threat to otherbuildings that have been densely packed together on the hillside. HongKong’s clay soil becomes unstable when saturated with water, and somany buildings constructed so close to each other could result, intimes of record rain, in mutual instability for all.

> In India, the problem was drought. This year the monsoon rains in someareas were delayed later than at any other time in this century. A heatwave roasted 14 Indian states, killed 800 persons and directly affectedanother 50 million. The loss in standing crops such as sugar cane andjute was over $400 million, and in several states famine reliefmeasures were introduced to give work and wages to people who wouldotherwise starve.

The monsoon rains finally arrived in Bombay last week. But in Delhi,where temperatures hovered around 110° F., the people were stillwaiting for rain, as was much of India’s parched northwest.

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