The extremes:
Best, worst of humanity on display,
Alasdair Conn has seen a lot on the operating table as a veteran surgeon and chief of emergency services at one of Boston’s biggest hospitals. But nothing prepared him for the day that a city centre street was transformed into a battlefield.
“This is something I’ve never seen in my 25 years here, this amount of carnage in the civilian population,” said Conn. “This is what we expect from war.”
In hospitals across the city, doctors and nurses fought to save the lives of victims maimed by the two homemade bombs that ripped through spectators and runners near the finishing line of the Boston Marathon on Monday.
Surgeons conducted the sort of emergency amputations that are normally practised in a conflict zone as the wounded were brought in with legs shredded or severed by the nails, ball-bearings and scrap metal packed into the devices.
Terror was visited on the streets of Boston on Patriots’ Day, a public holiday in Massachusetts. But the horrendous attacks demonstrated the best as well as the worst of humanity.
Chris Rupe, a surgeon from Kansas, had finished the marathon moments earlier. When he realized the horror of what was unfolding, he roused his weary limbs for a final race to help the wounded.
For an hour, he delivered life-saving emergency treatment to victims pushed into the medical tent in wheelchairs with limbs hanging off or blown away.
Nearby, Bruce Mendelsohn, who had been attending a race party by the course, used the techniques he learned as a medic in the U.S. army, staunching the blood flowing from terrible wounds.
“This stuff is more like Baghdad and Bombay than Boston,” he said. “It was pretty terrifying.”
Boston’s darkest day elicited inspiring stories of heroism and remarkable displays of resilience. There were the competitors who just kept on running, not to flee the terror, but to give blood at Red Cross centres; the race volunteers who dashed to help the injured, ignoring the danger of another bomb; the bystander who pulled off his belt to use it as an emergency tourniquet; the chef who used his apron to try to staunch the bleeding of a woman who had lost a leg.
Spectators’ cheers turned to screams when the two bombs exploded within 12 seconds of each other, about 100 metres apart in Boylston Street on the final stretch of one of the world’s biggest marathons.
The devices were clearly intended to mutilate as many bystanders and runners as possible. They killed three and injured 176, including a five-year-old girl who lost a leg and a 10-year-old boy who suffered deep shrapnel wounds to his lower limbs.
Among the injured was Jeff Bauman, the man in one of the most shocking images, being pushed away from the scene in a wheelchair, his lower limbs blown away. His family said that the 27-year-old, who was watching his girlfriend compete, had undergone a double amputation.
Several other suspect packages were found nearby as tens of thousands of onlookers fled the scene, many abandoning backpacks stuffed with food and clothes for relations and friends running the race. Federal investigators have confirmed that all were false alarms.
The acrid smell of the explosions lifted under the warm sun Tuesday. But with the area around the bombsite still cordoned off and heavily-armed police officers and the National Guard patrolling the streets, the centre of one of America’s most affluent cities resembled a post-conflict landscape.
For one group of runners and spectators, it was the second horror in just four months.
The 26th and final mile of the marathon was dedicated to the 26 victims of December’s Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Conn.
Nine Newtown residents were running in honour of the victims and some parents of the dead children watched from the VIP stands at the finishing line. All escaped physical harm, but not the shock. “Newtown cannot handle any more of this,” said Lisa Abrams, whose husband was among the competitors.
For Bostonians, the disbelief was still strong. “It was like something that you see in a movie or on the news in another country. It’s not something that you experience on Patriots’ Day at the Boston Marathon,” said Matt Hodgens, who as a child used to hand out orange slices to thirsty runners and was near the blast scene.
Thomas Menino, Boston’s mayor for 20 years, pledged that a city renowned for its tough Irish and Italian roots would fight back. Menino, 70, checked himself out of hospital where he was being treated for a broken leg to address his fellow constituents from a wheelchair. “We will get through this,” he insisted. “Boston will overcome.”