Dighton library planning zookeeper chats, summer reading challenge tauntongazette.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tauntongazette.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
I’d like to propose a memorial. Somewhere in the woods near Osprey Landing and Spinnaker Point, not far from the water tower, this city should erect a small granite monument. “At this spot on the afternoon of January 30, 1981,” a brass plate should read, “a miracle happened.” That’s all it will say. There might be the image of a jet bomber, but no more words.
The goal of a good memorial is to both honor someone or some event, but also to continually spark interest in the past. Unfortunately, we tend to memorialize tragedy and disaster while forgetting the teachable close calls. The fact that there were no casualties when an FB-111A jet bomber crashed into the most populated part of Portsmouth is exactly the reason we need to remember the event, to study it, to talk about it, and to memorialize it.
By J. Dennis Robinson
It’s enough to make anyone believe in miracles. On Jan. 30, 1981, a $10.5 million FB-111A jet bomber plummeted directly toward the most densely populated section of Portsmouth. Roughly 2,500 people lived in the low-rent apartment complex then known as Sea Crest and Mariner’s Village. A spray of jet fuel set buildings on fire as the pilotless plane ripped into the earth. But 40 years later, what might have been the world’s worst aviation disaster is scarcely a footnote in local history. There was a cascading liquid fire burning across the tops of the buildings, police officer Albert Pace recalled years later. It looked like a great wave at the beach coming in only it was all flames of liquid fuel. It was pretty spectacular.