Rescue video from Asiana plane crash shows girl Ye Mengyuan overlooked
A video obtained by the newspaper shows that the supervisor directing the firefighting effort at an airport crash site was not told that a teenage girl was on the ground until after she was mistakenly run over and killed by a fire truck, the paper said on Monday.
The video, which the obtained from an undisclosed source, was taken from a camera mounted on the helmet of a San Francisco Fire Department battalion chief and turned over to investigators who are probing the death of Ye Mengyuan, a 16-year-old passenger who survived the initial crash-landing but later died on the runway.
Mindy Talmadge, a fire department spokeswoman, declined on Monday to comment on the report, citing the ongoing crash investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.
More than 180 people were injured in the crash of Asiana Flight 214 last month, which had 307 people aboard when it hit a seawall in front of the runway, lost its tail and caught fire after skidding to a halt. Three passengers died.
Moments after the crash, two firefighters spotted Ye on the ground curled up in foetal position, the has reported. They manoeuvred their vehicle around her and notified supervisors.
At that point, at least two other firefighters looked at the girl and mistakenly concluded she was dead, the said. They then left Ye to attend to other survivors.
However, fire department commanders then ordered another vehicle into the area to spray fire retardant foam. But the video shows no evidence that those commanders had been notified that Yuan was on the ground there, the Chronicle reported.
That vehicle did not have heat-sensing equipment that could have detected a body obscured by the fire retardant, according to the Chronicle, and it ran over Ye. The driver of that vehicle has not been publicly identified.