Hi Jonathon,

Thanks for bringing this and Lawrence of Cyberia to the light of day. Never knew either. Love your blog and it's on my still short "Caravan Palace" list.

Has anything changed?

From a 1998 Los Angeles Times article.

http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/4277/exposure.html

Six years after the crash in the densely populated Bijlmermeer district, at least 1,200 residents and rescue workers are complaining of physical and psychological ailments they fear were caused by something carried in the El Al cargo hold.

With the disclosure this month that the jet carried sarin components, passions have flared among sick residents and their baffled doctors. A Dutch parliamentary inquiry has been ordered to try to discover the truth about the disaster.

Woman Found to Have Encephalomyelitis
Herma Sprey was preparing Sunday supper on the evening of Oct. 4, 1992, when the groaning engines of the El Al jet, which had just taken off from Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport after a refueling stop on its flight from New York, drew her to the kitchen window. She watched awe-struck as the jet lurched, then nose-dived into an apartment complex two blocks away, where she herself once lived. She ordered her children to stay inside and ran to the crash scene.

It was horrible because you couldn't help anyone. There was nothing you could do because it was so hot from the fires burning everywhere, recalled Sprey, now 45. She found one friend amid the chaos and helped her lead others out of undamaged but smoke-filled apartments nearby. She spent at least five hours in the crash zone...

After half a year, my hair fell out and I started getting these muscle cramps. I thought I had arthritis, said Sprey, who recently has been diagnosed with encephalomyelitis, an inflammation of the brain and spinal cord...

Because we don't know what was on board, we don't know if their complaints are related to the El Al crash, said Ijzermans. A lot of people have skin problems that won't go away. There are also arthritis-like symptoms in knees, elbows, hips, and allergy and breathing complaints. Several diseases with longer incubation times are just now showing up, like cancer...

Nothing has changed since 1992--there are still dangerous goods being flown over us every day, said Wesseling, who was en route home in her car with her two children when the jet crashed about a mile away, surrounding them with thick black smoke clouds and a shower of flaming debris...

I'm assuming that shortly after the photo was taken, the building completely collapsed, from the fires.

Nice one, Bruce. ;-)

I guess the low-income residents of the buildings didn't keep enough paper in their apartments to feed flames hot enough to melt the steel supporting beams.