#aura ion

[taberecusuflet]

Green Heart Christmas

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[i-gwarth]

Monday afternoon a medical airplane crashed in the mountains of West Transylvania, in Romania. It took more than 6 hours for the survivors to be rescued, by which time two were already dead

I am angry and would like to tell you about it.

The plane was carrying 5 medical workers to harvest organs for a Bucharest hospital. In the hours following the crash, out of the 7 people on board, pilot Adrian Iovan died crushed under the wreckage, while one of the medical workers, Aura Ion, a fifth year medical student doing volunteer work, froze to death just as the rescuers were arriving to the site. Six and a half hours after the crash, that is. Ultimately, she was a colleague of mine.

The rescuers who saved them, were actually 3 villagers from a nearby town and a local woodsman, who had heard about the crash on television. They took a car and went up the snow-covered mountain road, at night, to save these people; the location of the plane was uncertain but at least one of them deduced it from the reported thickness of the snow covering the ground, after talking on the phone with one of the survivors. Meanwhile, another one of the survivors, Dr. Radu Zamfir, had phoned for help; the emergency medical & rescue services had been notified, and the plane's distress beacon was, I believe, fully active. The official organizations were either not suitably equipped or not competently coordinated during this time: a mountainside rescue unit was dispatched in the wrong direction, the emergency response station receiving the distress signal was ill-equipped to track it, and so on. Despite hundreds of people searching, it was 4 civilians who ultimately came to save these people; when the car could go no further, they went to the crash site on foot and made stretchers out of nearby branches.

Minister of Internal Affairs Radu Stroe had this to say on the matter: "It is my bad fortune that this plane crashed during my term." He resigned earlier today.

Adrian Iovan was 56. Aura Ion was 23.

They could have been saved.

These are English-language articles I have found reporting the matter:

1, 2, 3.

I believe more people should be made aware of these two brave souls' sacrifice.