Holiday Eve Disasters

A plane crash and a dormitory fire stun two campuses

Students across the country last week were preparing to put aside their books and head home for the holidays. But the festive mood at two colleges was abruptly snapped by fiery disasters.

> The Purple Aces were the pride and passion of Evansville, Ind. Home games were often sold out. Season tickets to the best seats were so hard to come by that diehard fans fought over them in divorce settlements, and for good reason. The University of Evansville basketball team won five national small-college championships for the southern Indiana university and this year moved up into the National Collegiate Athletic Association's prestigious Division I. Evansville hired big-time Coach Bobby Watson from Oral Roberts University, recruited some hot-shooting freshmen and revived an old mascot: a cartoon riverboat gambler holding a winning poker hand of four aces. In spite of a record of one win and three losses, spirits were high as the team boarded a chartered DC-3 for the 70-min. hop to Nashville and a game against Middle Tennessee State University.

Flight 216 lifted off the runway into the rainy, foggy night and then banked left. Exactly one minute later, the plane thudded to the ground and burst into flames. The bodies of all 29 persons aboard were strewn like jackstraws around the twisted fuselage. They included 14 members of the Purple Aces, Coach Watson, the assistant director of athletics and two student managers.

Investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board immediately began trying to piece together what had happened to Flight 216. Two possibilities: engine failure or improperly stored baggage that threw the plane out of balance.

The crash was the sixth in which members of a U.S. athletic team traveling as a group were killed and the second in which an entire team was wiped out. The first was in 1961, when all 18 members of the U.S. figure-skating team perished in the crash of a chartered jet in Belgium. Federal regulations require charter pilots to pass stiff medical and flying tests and hold small charter firms to almost the same strict maintenance requirements met by big commercial carriers. The DC-3 in last week's crash was almost 30 years old but, according to officials at the safety board, appeared to have been kept in good condition by its owner, National Jet Service Inc. of Indianapolis.

After the disaster, the victims' bodies were put in rubber bags, removed from the crash site aboard a railroad boxcar and brought back to Evansville. Next morning some 1,500 students crammed into the university chapel for eulogies and prayers. On Sunday fans paid their last respects to the team at a memorial service in Roberts Stadium. The rest of the basketball season has been canceled. Said Junior Rory Hennings, 20, a close friend of four players who died: "I hadn't gotten to see them play this year because I was working the night of the only home game. Now I'm never going to see them play again."

> Coeds in four-story Aquinas Hall, the largest women's dormitory at Rhode Island's Providence College, had stopped their late-night cramming for final exams to engage in a bit of holiday fun. Competing for a $100 prize for the most elaborately decorated dorm, students on the top floor of the 38-year-old building pasted gaily colored tissue paper and Christmas posters on the walls and hung crepe-paper streamers from the ceilings. One coed scrawled MERRY CHRISTMAS with spray snow on the windows; another adjusted a gooseneck desk lamp to shine on a cardboard nativity scene set up on three metal garbage cans in the corridor.

Shortly before 3 a.m., the festive decorations caught fire, turning the 120 ft.-long hallway into a tunnel of flames. Aroused by a shrill fire alarm, residents on the lower floors rushed down three stairways to safety. Some students on the fourth floor prudently stayed in their rooms, which were separated from the corridor by fire-resistant doors; they were plucked to safety by fire fighters on ladders. But others panicked, threw open their doors and plunged into the inferno in a desperate sprint for the stairs. Two oeds leaped to their deaths on the frozen ground 40 ft. below. Said one sobbing Providence student: "People were telling :hem not to jump. I guess they didn't hear." Fire fighters needed only 42 minutes to douse the blaze--but that was time enough for seven young women to die and 15 others to be injured. Five bodies were found huddled together in the corridor, less than 75 ft. from the nearest escape stairway.

Aquinas Hall had easily passed a city safety inspection last September. Further, investigators said there were no violations of the city's fire code, even though the dormitory is not equipped with sprinklers, outside fire escapes or smoke detectors in every room. Providence city regulations require all these to be installed in new buildings. But the rules exempt dormitories that were built before the code took effect last year.

The day after the fire, final exams were canceled, and students packed their bags to head for home. The Dominican priests who run the college made plans to attend the dead students' funerals and visit the families of those who were injured. Fire officials sifted the debris for clues to the cause of the blaze. The most likely suspect: the gooseneck lamp that had illuminated the cardboard creche.

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