The Crash of Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 - Rescue
http://eastern401.googlepages.com/crash2
To grasp the size of the Everglades and their barren quality, it is necessary to imagine a land area half as large as Connecticut, flooded by a foot of water and overgrown with impenetrable sage. On December 29th, 1972, Robert Marquis and a friend rode an airboat through the dark expanse of the swamp. They were gigging frogs. "As far as I am concerned, there's nothing like it," he said. "There's not a prettier place you can go to get away from people."
The moon had set at 1:12 that afternoon, and a half a mile high, a few clouds plumed in frosty trails. The airboat tunneled through the darkness, its path picked out by a light that Marquis wore on his head, like a coal miner's headlamp. He had fashioned the lamp himself, and kept his head turned slightly to the right. He was looking for bullfrogs to catch. Marquis navigated through the dark swamp by little more than dead reckoning and experience. According to Marquis, he had never been lost in the Glades, although he would concede that "I got misplaced a few times." The trick was to keep in your head a mental map of where you were at all times. He knew that the long, faint glow in the distance was made by the lights of Miami, to the east. And he knew that behind him on the west was Levee 67C, an edifice of the Central and Southern Florida Flood Control District.
My 11:40 Marquis and his friend had caught about thirty pounds of frogs. He had been working his way east, toward the glow of Miami, and now he pulled back on the steering stick and turned the boat north, then a little northwest. Marquis then noticed the lights of a large jet. The plane was flying west, and it seemed very close. Although he couldn't hear the jet over the roar of the airboat's motor, he knew it was very close; he could see the strobe lights flashing in the ends of the wings. Moments later he saw "a ball of fire, an orange, orange glow that just lit up and spread out for about eight thousand feet across the Glades; looked like maybe it went up a hundred foot high, just for a short duration of eight or ten seconds." He yelled to his passenger, Rayburn Dickinson, "that was a plane crash, wasn't it?"
"Yeah, looked like it."
Marquis put his foot on the throttle and started darting across the swamp in the blackness toward where he had seen the flash.
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Robert Marquis' airboat jounced over the saw grass through the dark swamp for about fifteen minutes. Robert stopped the motor and listened. He heard screams in the distance and was dismayed by the thought that the noise was coming from the other side of the flood control levee. He continued in the direction of the shouts and stopped again. Now the screams seemed to be coming from behind him. He ran the airboat around a thick strand of growth. "The first thing I saw was a great big piece of the wreckage as I was coming across this heavy saw grass. And I literally run right into it. I had to stop the boat, get out, turn it around. It dented the rake on the front of the boat...I turned around, got back on the trail...and hit the path where the plane hit the ground. It looked about fifty to a hundred yards wide and maybe a quarter of a mile long just littered with trash and debris."
"When I first started working into the wreckage, I began seeing people - some of them laying in the water, some of them wandering around, walking, but very slowly. I got as close as I could without running over anybody, and then I got out. There were dead people everywhere. And everywhere I looked were half-naked people. Some completely naked. I felt so helpless. The first one I came to was a man who looked like he was about to drown. Looked like both his legs were broken. Couldn't move. The only thing he could move was his head, and it kept falling into the water. He said, 'Help me; I can't hold my head up much longer.' So I pulled him up and rested his back and propped his head up out of the water. There were lots of people in turned-over seats, their heads in the water. I tried to help the ones that possibly were drowning."
After some minutes, Marquis noticed a helicopter in the sky. It was obviously searching for the crash, but it was sweeping the wrong area. He slogged back to his airboat, got his helmet light and began swinging it around.
. Not too many people like that in the world today 
