ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. – A month after a deadly small plane crash in St. Augustine, questions remain about the response time of rescuers when it came to reaching the wreckage.
Marriane Fox, 49, was killed when her plane landed upside down in a marsh after investigators said she overshot the runway. She died in a hospital the next day.
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Response times were a topic of discussion Monday during an airport authority board meeting, as was the crash that took Fox’s life. Bruce Kreis witnessed it.
“I saw her approach. I saw the entire thing happen. I was here for more than two hours. I watched it all,” Kreis said.
But he really paid close attention to the length of time it took firefighters to locate and rescue Fox, who was trapped in her cockpit while her plane was inverted in the water. While trapped, she was still in communication with the control tower. It was only after she was rescued and taken to the hospital when she died from her injuries.
“The response to this accident has brought to public attention the failure of the airport’s approach to safety,” Kreis told the board.
The day after the crash, St. Augustine fire officials would not say how long it took them to get to Fox, but said they had to get an airboat in the water to get to her location, which they said was 600 yards from the end of the runway. Critics of the response time say an airboat, or some kind of watercraft, should have been readily available to deploy from airport property.
“We had sheriff helicopters at the other end of the field that could have been there in five minutes. Why were they not called instead of an airboat that took 40 minutes to get here?” Kreis said. “I want to see a more coordinated and direct approach. More prepared.”
Kreis believes more money needs to go into safety and the fire station at the airport needs to be manned full-time.
Bruce Maguire is the airport authority chairman. He said he’s all for making sure rescuers can respond to a crash in a timely manner, but he also says airports this size — compared to much larger airports — don’t have that kind of money to spend, so they have to rely heavily on community services, like the city’s fire department.
‘We cannot provide all those services. If we did, we’d have to charge the pilot association and other pilots such an exorbitant fee they wouldn’t come around any more,” Maguire said.
One of the board members brought up the idea of forming a safety review committee. Maguire said he didn’t have a problem with it, as long as discussions within the committee didn’t lead to lawsuits against the airport in reference to previous crashes.