By Tom Shaw
Omaha World-Herald (Nebraska)
Copyright 2007 The Omaha World-Herald Company
COUNCIL BLUFFS, Neb. — The three men searched for the plane 10 feet at a time.
Snow was blowing ferociously, making it hard to see and stinging the skin. Treynor volunteer firefighter Jeff Theulen had to pull down the visor on his helmet.
“That was horrible,” he said. “It was like someone throwing rocks at your face.”
The firefighters trudged through a remote field looking for any sign of a downed plane the night of Feb. 16. They had set out on foot after their truck got stuck near a farmhouse.
Near whiteout conditions and communication problems were a major challenge as rescue workers and area residents responded to the rural area southeast of Council Bluffs.
After more than half an hour in the field, another Treynor firefighter, Tony Eblen, used his flashlight to signal Theulen and Lewis Township Fire Chief Tom Blackburn.
Eblen had found something.
Fiery debris was on the ground. Nearby the firefighters confirmed at least two fatalities and later would find two more victims.
The plane crashed north of Pioneer Trail and Dumfries Avenue, about 3 1/2 miles south of the Council Bluffs Municipal Airport, where it was supposed to land. The plane’s pilot -- Steve Revord of Omaha -- and all three passengers died in the crash. The cause of the accident is being investigated.
Passengers Shawn Sorenson Peters and April Myers of Council Bluffs and Dale Peckham of Glenwood were employees of Dallas Johnson Greenhouses. They were returning from a one-day business trip to Texas.
Before 9:30 p.m., the plane was cleared by a radar station in Bellevue to approach the Council Bluffs airport. At that time the aircraft was between 3,000 and 4,000 feet in the air and about 15 miles from the airport, said Don Hughes, station manager. The station was directing the plane because the Bluffs airport doesn’t have a control tower.
But just minutes from landing, the twin-engine Cessna’s low altitude triggered an alarm at the Bellevue station. The plane went off the radar.
Because the pilot had not confirmed a landing, the station contacted the Bluffs airport and authorities. Personnel at the airport said the plane hadn’t landed. Soon 911 operators got reports from people who thought they saw a low-flying plane and a fireball in a field.
Two dozen firefighters from the Treynor and Lewis Township volunteer fire departments, as well as a handful of sheriff’s deputies, were involved in the search.
The bad weather, with wind gusts of more than 40 mph, was creating problems throughout the region. There were all sorts of car accidents and injuries, and Pottawattamie County’s emergency dispatch channel was jammed with chatter from several rescue agencies.
The high radio traffic and a sketchy location of the crash made organizing the search more difficult.
Treynor firefighter Gene Geer said a man who saw a fireball pointed them in the right direction. The field was covered in snow, and the truck with the three firefighters didn’t make it far.
The firefighters left the truck and spread out a football field apart to look for the plane and any survivors. When they found the crash site, Blackburn picked up his radio to call in the location of the debris.
But he had to make multiple attempts over a few minutes to get through to a makeshift command post because of all the radio traffic.
Theulen was particularly frustrated with the radio situation. As a full-time Omaha police sergeant who oversees the department’s helicopter unit, Theulen often uses Douglas County’s more powerful radio system. That system, the kind that Pottawattamie County wants to buy, allows for rescuers at a disaster to use a radio channel that is separate from regular emergency radio traffic.
By the time the plane was found, search organizers had gotten offers of snowmobiles from local residents.
Snowmobiles weren’t necessary by that point. Geer had called a friend whose family farm was close by. The friend, Brad Viterna, brought a tractor equipped with a cab and a frontend loader to the area.
Viterna and a firefighter were in the tractor heading into the field when word of the plane’s discovery came over the radio.
Viterna had never been part of a search operation before, but he said he wasn’t nervous.
“Quite honestly,” he said, “the wind and visibility was so bad I was just trying to concentrate on driving the tractor. . . . I was completely disoriented.”
Viterna stayed near the crash site until he was called back to the command post to pick up a sheriff’s deputy. The Federal Aviation Administration had told authorities to secure the scene.
About 2 1/2 hours later — 1:30 a.m. — the FAA said it was OK to remove the victims from the site. Viterna, who had returned home, was called to return with the tractor to help with the recovery and clear a path for other vehicles to get to the site.
Sheriff Jeff Danker said when he was at the scene in the daylight it appeared that the plane had skipped on the ground and gone though a patch of trees before coming to a stop in the field.
Treynor Fire Chief Russ Maguire said it was the first plane crash search he’d assisted with during his 20 years with the department. And the conditions were among the toughest he’s seen.
“That was one of the worst times I remember being out,” he said.