Emergency workers in Costa Rica walked through a remote mountain forest on Tuesday carrying a woman who was in critical condition after she survived a plane crash that killed five of the six people aboard.
The Cessna 206 Stationair crashed Monday afternoon in the Pico Blanco area southwest of the capital, San José, the Costa Rican Red Cross said. The plane was carrying the pilot, the co-pilot and a family.
The 31-year-old woman was the only survivor. She was rescued in a protracted effort that was complicated by the nighttime conditions and the remote location of the crash site, which could be reached only on foot.
Rescuers said that they headed to the area without knowing the precise location of the crash. As darkness fell, they were about to give up for the day when they heard a scream about 10 p.m. in response to their calls, said Christopher Calderón Bailey, a chief rescuer at the Costa Rican Red Cross.
The survivor was conscious but in critical condition, with injuries to her head, arms and legs, as well as hypothermia, he said. Guided by headlamps, rescuers administered first aid and carried her on a stretcher overnight on a 14-hour journey.
“You couldn’t see well,” he said in a phone interview from the mountains. “It was really difficult, people had to walk carefully,” he added, noting that it was “very slippery.”
They reached an ambulance around 6 a.m. Tuesday, Calderón Bailey said, which transported the survivor to a hospital in San José.
A video that a Red Cross spokesperson, Patricia Solórzano Cordero, shared with The New York Times showed rescue workers wearing hiking gear and headlamps as they made their way through a dense jungle, scrambling over roots as they brushed against branches.
The search crew included 60 Red Cross rescuers, 13 emergency vehicles and a canine unit, Solórzano Cordero said. When a group of rescuers found the plane wreckage at 8:30 p.m., two of the crash victims were still alive, she said.
Rescuers said that the survivor did not have details on what caused the crash. After she was rescued, Calderón Bailey said, it took the team another five or so hours to extract the bodies of the other passengers from the crash site.
Costa Rica’s civil aviation agency did not immediately respond to inquiries about the crash.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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