A turboprop plane carrying 51 passengers and crew crashed into a steel mill yard in Venezuela and burst into flames Monday, killing 15 people.Authorities said 36 survivors were pulled from the wreckage of the French-built ATR-42 plane owned by Venezuela's state-run airline Conviasa.The aircraft was flying from the Caribbean island of Margarita to the southern industrial city Puerto Ordaz when it came down near the gates of the vast Sidor mill on the banks of the Orinoco REmployees at the steel foundry pulled people from the smoking wreckage of the plane. Foundry worker Frank Oliveros, 44, said he saw a huge billow of smoke after the crash, then saw the wreckage and joined dozens of fellow employees and firefighters who rushed to the scene.Oliveros told The Associated Press by telephone. "Our only interest was getting all the people out of there alive."
A nearby Puerto Ordaz hospital received injured people and bodies from the crash site. Hospital director Yanitza Rodri"There was a miracle here today, we have 36 people who survived, with problems, but alive thank God, all of them treatable and many of them already in their homes," local governor Francisco Rangel Gomez said. "The workers of Sidor are heroes, one of them even climbed on the plane and kicked his way in."
An official at the National Civil Aviation Institute said the pilot had radioed in a mayday signal seconds before the plane crashed.guez said many of the injuries were serious.