Shepardson said he put the kibosh on those plans until a fleet of guards had been dispatched to the hospital to make sure curtains on all windows facing the morgue had been drawn. "It was a bad situation all the way around," recalled Shepardson.
Meanwhile, problems kept piling up. A local Holiday Inn offered the use of a ballroom as a meeting point for relatives awaiting word of passengers who'd been aboard the plane. But the unthinkable happened. "Here we had a ballroom full of highly emotional people, many of whom didn't speak English, and one of the hotel people calls me aside to say we've got a little problem," recalled Shepardson. "Yes, you guessed it. It turns out that we had to move everyone out of the room because the hotel goofed. It seems that they'd booked a wedding into the room for later that day and forgotten to tell us about it."
And so it went. Concerned about negative publicity in news photos, Avianca reportedly wasted no time in sending a crew out to paint over the name of the airline on the crash wreckage. However, Shepardson said, the airline was considerably slower to send an official to help deal with the red tape associated with the carnage.
Adding a final note of absurdity to the tragedy was a government bureaucrat who materialized with a strange query. "As if we didn't have enough to worry about," Shepardson said, "this officious guy comes in and wants to know whether we've destroyed all the fruit on the plane yet."
several weeks after the Multiple Death Conference, event organizer Ethel De Marr conducted her own postmortem. For her, at least, the most valuable information from Arizona's second annual fatality seminar surfaced with regard to the Avianca disaster, raising questions about a foreign airliner's crash on domestic turf.
"That was a good lesson learned," she said. "Here in Arizona, I don't think we'd considered the possibility of a crash involving a Mexican plane. In this country, the airlines have a huge role to play, especially when it comes to payment for processing the bodies. What are our relationships with some of the foreign carriers?"
When it comes to the other logistic problems of mass disaster, Phoenix is getting a jump on most other cities. Earlier this year, Phoenix beat out several other Western cities for the right to house a so-called "mobile morgue." The $40,000 cache of morgue equipment is housed at a Sky Harbor hangar, either for use here or for quick shipment to other cities in the West. (Los Angeles, the biggest Western city, was ruled out as a storage place because officials feared an earthquake would destroy the stash of equipment.)
For now, all this talk about huge disasters in Arizona is fortunately just talk. But as De Marr says, "You can always benefit from listening to other people's experiences."
Well, die and learn.
TRYING TO BE A HERO... v6-17-92
