Air France jet skids off runway in Toronto

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

:: finally home ::

I work ten kilometres directly west of the airport, under the northern flight path, actually (plane shadows pass over the building). I travel along the 401 every day past the airport.

My cube is a little in from the windows, and since I often have headphones on, I’m often not very aware of the weather outside.

When I got to work, it was hot and clear. I ate lunch inside as usual, enjoying the air-conditioning (my apartment has none). Around 14:00 I went briefly outside, but the weather was more humid and the air was more polluted, so I just turned around and went back to the air-conditioning.

Later I was chatting with my co-worker and she mentioned that she’d just been outside, and the weather was still humid and close. Sometime later it began to rain. Around 15:30 I started to hear (through my headphones, even) the sound of thunder. We went around the corner to look out the windows and beheld intense rain. We looked at it ar a couple of moments, then returned to our cubes.

A little later the sound of the rain on the windows and roof changed. We took another look. The rain had increaded, and hail was banging against the windows and bouncing on the ground. I can’t remember the last time I saw hail.

The hail stopped, but the rain and wind increased to torrents. Traffic was crawling along Meadowvale Boulevard, and the buildings on the far side were veiled by the rain.

It was around 16:00, and I began to wonder what the bus ride home would be like. I was going to the Esperanto club meeting downtown, and I didn’t want to miss it. My plan was to leave at 18:00, but if the weather kept up, I might leave earlier to make up for delays on the road.

We marveled at the hail, then returned to our cubes.

A little later, there was an announcement over the company PA system: “There has been an accident <mumble> the 401 east<mumble> is blocked.”

I wasn’t sure whether that meant the eastbound lanes were blocked, or whether the blockage was east of our location. I began to get a feeling this was no ordinary storm.

I said, “I’d better save my files,” and I did. About a minute later, the power blinked off and on, and all the desktop computers reset. I powered up again, and a little while later the power blinked again. Another reset. I went into the hall to get a drink, and saw everyone standing around and talking the way we do when we can’t actually use our computers to do actual work.

When I returned, my computer was back up. It was around 16:20. I restarted FrameMaker, and reopened my files, checking them over. The rain continued.

My co-worker started to make noises about leaving at 17:00, and o her computer she pulled up a webcam showing brilliant sunshine on the Ancaster roundabout in Hamilton, to the west.

I decided to check the Ministry of Transport traffic cams to see what conditions on the highways were like, and whether I’d need to leave early. A check on the Mininstry website showed sunshine to the middle of Burlington, increasing wetness towards Toronto, and dryness east of the city.

I selected cams by the airport, trying to get a good view of the traffic situation. East of the airport: a traffic jam heading west. West of the airport: a jam heading east. Then I clicked on a cam south of the airport, where Highway 401’s twelve-lane freeway forms the south side of the airport property. I saw a jam. Another cam. No picture: a ‘broken image’ icon. A third cam. A view off the road, at something burning in the ravine of Etobicoke Creek, with trucks spraying water and smoke billowing.

“Oh crap. That doesn’t look like a car crash.”

22

I had just left work while the Storm was getting heavy. I work just across the 401 from the Airport. I was just a little east of the crash and had left at 4:14. The sky was so dark and the rain so heavy I didn’t notice a thing. Too busy trying to see the road ahead. I got home just in time to be told that a plane crashed across from my work.

I swear I thought there wasn’t a chance anyone could have survived. I was releived that no one was killed.
It is kind of eerie seeing as that location is close to where the Air Canada flight crashed in 1978/79

23

It was about 16:50, and I decided to leave work early, to catch the 17:06 bus home. I saved my files. A quick glance at the Toronto Star website yielded a breaking news bulletin about a place crash.

17:00. I locked (but did not shut down) the computer, and ran for the exit.
As I got to the door, I saw that it was still raining, but the sky was bright in the west and the rain was rapidly lessening. I paused a coupe of minutes, then ran outside and across the parking lot.

“What a day to forget my umbrella…”

As I got to the bus stop, the rain ceased. Traffic hissed by. A few minutes later, more clouds advanced, and large scattered raindrops began to fall, plopping into the puddles and creating bubbles.

“Oh no. The bus isn’t here yet…” I sheltered behind the light pole. Fortunately the bus appeared, and within a minute I was on it, damp but happy.

The bus continued its route through the Meadowvale North business park. As it crossed Derry Road, I saw a truly-incredible torrent of traffic coming from the east, filling all three lanes.

The bus stopped in front of the Royal Bank building, where the largest group of passengers got on. The road in front of the Royal Bank building is in a low hill, and offers a fine view of the gentle valley of the Credit River over the industrial park to the east; on clear days the CN tower and the tops of the downtown skyscrapers are visible on the horizon. I looked to the east and saw clouds of smoke on the horizon, darker even than the storm clouds.

The bus continued. When we got to Derry Road again, we should have turned left and joined the westbound flow on Derry, then turned left again to take Mississauga Road down to the highway. But the flow on Derry was stop-and-go… mostly stop. The driver abandoned the left turn, and detoured around the traffic to reach Mississauga Road by another route. Even so, it took three lights worth of waiting to turn onto Mississauga Road.

It looked like everyone had decided to leave work early.

Eventually the bus reached its last stop on Mississauga Road, its last stop before becoming a freeway express and taking the Highway 401 freeway all the way to the subway in Toronto. It pushed its way along through the stop-and-go traffic… but when it got to the overpass crossing Highway 401, I saw to my surprise that the freeway was flowing smoothly, and all the stop-and-go traffic was continuing south on Mississauga Road.

We joined the freeway, and accelerated to cruising speed. It has taken half an hour to fight our way through a neighbourhood route that should have taken ten to fifteen minutes, but now, at least, we were moving.

We crossed the city of Mississauga at speed. Traffic, both east- and west-bound, was light. But then… quite sudenly, a jam at the 410 interchange. We slowed sharply, and the bus driver headed for the local “collector” lanes, where there was an exit from the highway. Looking through the bridges of the interchange, we could see that the central “express” lanes of the 401 were already stopped. The collector lanes were jamming to a halt ahead as well.

The driver stopped the bus at the last minute, straddling the painted line where the exit to Dixie Road diverged from the collector lanes. I think he was asking permission to diverge from his route, since there were no stops olong the freeway.

I was sitting on the lefthand side of the bus, and I could see a space before the stopped traffic in the collector lanes ahead. In the lefthand collector lane to my left, a Sprinter van with a FedEx logo became aware of the blockage ahead, slowed, stopped, and backed toward us, seeking escape. It turned to cut across the three traffic lanes, and another car, slowing, almost rammed it.The car stopped in time, and the van crossed the lanes and made its escape in front of the bus, vasnishing into the traffic in the exit lanes.

A Jeep backed past us in the lefthand breakdown lane. I didn’t see what happened to it, because the bus driver turned the bus towards the exit. We waited for a gap in the exiting traffic on our right, and made our escape onto the exit ramp.

While we were on the exit ramp, I head the bus radio requesting the drivers not to call in because of the “volume of events around the city”. I’ve never heard that before.

The exit ramp to Dixie Road is quite long, and parallels the collector lanes for a kilometre or so, separated only by a low barrier. Where it diverges to meet Dixie Road, the barrier ends, and there is only a wide expanse of grass between the roads.

Across this grass runs an extremely unofficial dirt trail, used as a shortcut by people wanting to exit who didn’t or couldn’t use the actual exit. I have never actually seen anyone drive this trail, though I have seen tow trucks parked there as they lie in wait for their prey.

As we approached the trail this time, I was startled to see an eighteen-wheeler on the trail, fording the mud and pools of water and converging with the bus. As it lined up with the curb, preparing to enter the exit road, it fell in behind us.

We got to Dixie Road. The traffic signals were out, blinking red, and a police officer was directing traffic. I caught a glimpse of the crash site in the distance on the other side of the 401, smoke pouring off it. We turned right.

24

We turned right onto Dixie Road and pushed south through the stop-and-go traffic. A few blocks later, we turned left onto Matheson Boulevard, and we were free of the jam. The westbound lanes weren’t so free–the flood of traffic heading west hadn’t forgotten Matheson–but we were just tooling along through the industrial park, heading east, parallel to the 401.

Ahead I noticed a haziness in the air. We crossed the bridge over Etobicoke Creek and entered the Airport South office park, directly across the 401 from the airport itself.

We were now about a kilometre directly south of the crash site, and this was the smoke plume.

We entered the bluish-white haze. The bus was sealed and its air-conditioning was on, so it took some time for the smoky air to penetrate to the bus cabin. I smelt a kind of plasticky smell, like broken Legos. Visibility was low. I looked at the cars in the stop-and-go traffic heading west, and wondered what they were smelling.

A few hundred metres further, and we were through.

We continued through the office park, zigzagging towards the corner of Eglinton Avenue and Renforth Drive. Bypassing a queue of vehicles waiting to turn, we turned onto Eglinton, then turned south on Renforth.

I knew where we were going. Highway 427 is the freeway that goes south from the airport area towards the lake. It’s part of the route downtown (and, for this particular bus, to the subway). We were going to avoid the rest of the jam on the 401 and sneak back onto the 427 through an obscure entrance fed by a nondescript suburban road that many people completely miss.

The bus driver didn’t miss it. I felt smug as we passed along the suburban road, thinking of the mere ten minutes of freeway travel left before the exit to the subway.

We reached the 427… and I was shocked to see that it, too, was jammed up heading south. We joined the inching masses.

25

We crept southward on the 427. I overheard someone on their cellphone saying that they heard the crashing plane was hit by lightning in the storm.

As we got closer to the Burnhamthorpe exit, I realised that the source of the jam was a solid stream of vehicles exiting onto Burnhamthorpe. Halted by the lights, the jam was backing up onto the freeway.Was the entire world trying to drive west?

We picked up speed afterwards… until the next jam, which was at our exit, Dundas Street. The bus driver sped past the waiting vehicles, and right where the exit diverged, puklled up beside another Mississauga bus, which let our bus in. We inched down the off-ramp… and again, discovered that all the traffic was trurning west. The bay to wait to turn east on Dundas Street was actually empty.

We were back on our route and home free. As the bus pulled up to the lights, the passengers spontaneously broke into applause.

We made the rest of the journey to the subway station in good time through normal traffic. I got to my meeting in good time, too.

I think we were quite lucky, all in all. Fate smiled upon all of us… but especially the people on the plane.

26

Today’s Globe and mail has a few good articles about the crash-- and also takes the pain to point out that many passengers grabbed their carry-on luggage before jumping off the plane.

27

Heh. On the news this morning, a survivor was being interviewed at his home. He was clutching in one hand a large glass of wine as he described what it was like inside the plane just after the crash. Our anchorman remarked that he wouldn’t even have bothered with using a glass after an experience like that.

28

I was at the airport waiting for a Northwest flight to Minneapolis.

Let me tell you, it’s not fun when you’re a guy afraid of flying to see a column of black smoke emerging from the end of 15-L.

29

Heh. I would have done that.

I’d like to hear what the pilot has to say about all this.

30

Your attention please, we have an important message for all self-centered morons who jump up the second the plane has all its wheels on the ground and start digging your luggage out of the overhead compartments (usually onto the heads of your fellow passengers):
ASK NOT FOR WHOM THE CLUE PHONE RINGS IT RINGS FOR THEE
I might well have been one of the idjits who grabbed her carry-on luggage on the way out of the plane… but if I did, it would have been due to force of habit, I think. I hope. I always take a backpack when I travel, and I become quite paranoid about it…