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Rescue teams worked tirelessly through the night, cutting through steel with hydraulic tools, opening compartments inch by inch. Firefighters described crawling into spaces barely wide enough to breathe, listening for the faintest sounds indicating someone was still alive. In some cases, they had to remove the dead to reach the survivors trapped beneath them—a grim but necessary reality in mass-casualty disasters.
“At times, you had to choose,” one rescuer said. “You knew people were alive somewhere, but the only way to reach them was through what was left of others.” The physical exhaustion was extreme, but the emotional toll was even heavier. Every cry answered, every voice found, came with the painful awareness that others would not be.
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