Editorial: VBT truly blessed for no injuries in Sunday air crash

It was a bright, sunny day in Van Buren Township, with lots of boats on Belleville Lake full of people with eyes lifted to the skies in expectation. It was the last part of the two-day Thunder Over Michigan Air Show at Willow Run Airport and a Russian MiG was swooping through the air manned by two crewmembers.
When the two small explosions sounded and the crowd saw the two headed toward earth with parachutes, some said they thought it was part of the show. When the MiG crashed, they knew it wasn’t and fear erupted. The jet crashed at The Waverly apartments and mass casualties were expected.
But, the only injuries were to the two who ejected from the jet and they appeared to be slight. They were taken to St. Joseph Mercy Hospital for evaluation.
Then, the cleanup work began. First, emergency crews put out the fires from the crash, which was next to, not into, the apartments. The pieces of the plane that were thrown over a wide area when it crashed were to be gathered up and taken to Willow Run Airport for a lengthy inspection by the NTSB and the jet fuel scooped up with soil removal. The firefighting foam used to extinguish the blazes, containing PFAS, was to be removed as well.
In all, our community was very blessed that we weren’t dealing with mass casualties. But, we’ll never forget.