Death toll rises to 12 in UPS air disaster in Louisville, Kentucky, involving plane just serviced for cracked fuel tankThe death toll has risen to 12, including one child, in Tuesday’s horrific crash of a UPS cargo plane in Louisville, Kentucky. Sixteen people remain unaccounted for as of this writing.
On Tuesday afternoon, a team of investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) arrived on the scene. In a press conference, officials confirmed that the plane’s left engine caught fire and separated from the aircraft during takeoff. The cargo plane, carrying more than 200,000 pounds of jet fuel for its scheduled flight to Hawaii, plowed through a dense industrial district south of the Louisville airport, setting off an inferno that was visible for miles.
The prospect of finding any more survivors is poor. One investigator told reporters that there was not much left of the fuselage that was recognizable because of the intensity of the fire.
The death toll could easily have been orders of magnitude higher. The plane crashed into the Kentucky Petroleum Recycling facility, raising the danger of secondary explosions and fires. Firefighters said they expect to remain on the scene for at least a week to monitor the site and extinguish any flareups.
The area immediately south of Louisville’s airport is lined with factories and industrial facilities employing thousands of workers. The site of the crash is only a few hundred yards from Ford’s Louisville Assembly Plant, which employs more than 3,000 people. The nearby UPS air cargo facility, known as Worldport, is the company’s largest and the central hub of its national logistics network. It is one of the most advanced operations in the company, capable of processing 400,000 packages per hour. Thousands of workers, most of them young part-timers, work at Worldport. UPS even has an agreement with local high schools to provide a steady stream of new labor.
Freight railroad CSX also operates its massive Osborne classification yard immediately west of the airport.
Schools in the area, which were shut down out of fear of toxic chemical release, are set to reopen Thursday. The airport’s passenger terminal has also reopened, though only one of its two runways is in operation. The Worldport hub is reportedly shut down for the time being.
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