By Dennis Taylor Dispatch Assistant Editor
Gilroy
– A small airplane crashed into the city wastewater treatment
plant Monday afternoon, apparently killing all on board.
By Dennis Taylor Dispatch Assistant Editor
Gilroy – A small airplane crashed into the city wastewater treatment plant Monday afternoon, apparently killing all on board.
Pieces of the two-seater plane were scattered along cement platforms adjacent to treatment ponds, while the main fuselage was submerged under roughly 20 feet of wastewater. There were no signs of survivors.
Crews began draining the ponds Monday evening to recover victims, a process expected to take up to 15 hours.
Emergency crews had difficulty locating the debris after responding to calls of a plane down at about 4pm. The original call placed the crash scene near Highway 152 and Frazier Lake Road, while subsequent calls placed it in a field behind Gilroy Foods. Fire crews from the California Department of Forestry and the Santa Clara County Fire Department set up a search parameter that ran from Highway 152 to Bloomfield Road and east to Frazier Lake, an area of several square miles.
Fire trucks drove along the levy of Llagas Creek while crews trudged through thick, dense brush before the plane’s debris was spotted in the wastewater plant by a Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office helicopter at about 5:05pm.
Chris Duran and John Dryden, both of Gilroy, were standing in the driveway of a friend’s house on Pacheco Pass Highway when their friend shouted “Whoa, look at that plane!”
“I turned around and saw this plane spiraling nose-first into the ground,” said Duran, who along with Dryden, was helping fire crews search the dense growth along Llagas Creek for signs of wreckage. “It was maybe 400 to 500 feet in the air and spinning in.”
Deputies and firefighters recovered some small debris floating in the water, including what appeared to be some type of flight books.
Identifying information, such as registration numbers and flight log information, was forwarded to the Federal Aviation Administration, according to Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Deputy Serg Palanov. He declined to release that information to The Dispatch.
John Benson, manager of Magnum Aviation at San Martin Airport, said “we’ve accounted for all our (rental) planes.”
The search included helicopters from both the Califonia Highway Patrol and the Sheriff’s department, as well as one unidentified fixed-wing aircraft. The aircraft staged and refueled at San Martin Airport.
A command station was established at the end of Southside Road next to the creek, where sheriff’s deputies, fire crews and paramedics monitored images on a computer screen broadcast from cameras aboard the sheriff’s helicopter. By 6pm paramedics were standing down as the operation moved from search and rescue to recovery.
