A Delta Airlines jet making an emergency landing at Los Angeles International Airport dumped fuel on the playground of an elementary school in the flight path on Tuesday, inflicting minor injuries on 17 children and nine adults, local and federal authorities said.

All of the injuries at Park Avenue Elementary School in suburban Cudahy were said to be minor and none of the victims needed hospitalization, the Los Angeles County Fire Department said on Twitter.

“Shortly after takeoff, Flight 89 from LAX to Shanghai experienced an engine issue requiring the aircraft to return quickly to LAX. The aircraft landed safely after a release of fuel, which was required as part of normal procedure to reach a safe landing weight,” Delta said in a written statement.

“We are in touch with Los Angeles World Airports and the L.A. County Fire Department and share concerns regarding reported minor injuries to adults and children at a school in the area,” the airline said.

The Federal Aviation Administration said in a separate statement that it was “thoroughly investigating the circumstances” behind the incident and suggested the flight may not have followed fuel-dumping rules.

“There are special fuel-dumping procedures for aircraft operating into and out of any major US airport,” the agency said. “These procedures call for fuel to be dumped over designated unpopulated areas, typically at higher altitudes so the fuel atomizes and disperses before it reaches the ground.”

The fire department said it had confirmed that jet fuel was the substance dropped on the school’s playground while students were at recess and that 70 firefighters were on the scene treating the injured.Other students had been evacuated from the elementary school following the incident, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s spokeswoman said.

Parents were notified to pick up their children near the school, which is about 16 miles east of the airport. Two streets were closed during the emergency response.

The mayor of Cudahy, Elizabeth Alcantar, said on Twitter the city had opened an emergency response center following the incident and would conduct a “townhall” meeting to provide more information.

(Source: Reuters)

Waves of ballistic missiles, soldiers hunkered down in bunkers for hours, intense shock waves — a top US commander said he reacted to Iran’s unprecedented attack against an Iraqi base with “disbelief”.

In an exclusive interview with AFP at the Ain al-Asad airbase in western Iraq, Lt. Colonel Tim Garland said his superiors had given him “a couple hours of advance warning” last Tuesday night that an attack by Iran was coming.

“My first reaction was shock, initial disbelief,” he said, sceptical that Iran would be capable, and willing, to conduct a bold attack on Ain al-Asad.

The airbase was targeted in retaliation for the US killing top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in a drone strike in Baghdad on January 3.

The base is one of the largest in Iraq, with 1,500 US troops making up the bulk of a coalition presence directly adjacent to thousands of Iraqi forces.

Getting those forces to safety was an act of quick thinking and coordination across the army and air force commanders at Ain al-Asad, Garland said.

By 11:00pm (2000 GMT), US and coalition forces had evacuated from their sleeping quarters and offices, and were hiding out either in fortified bunkers or dispersed across the base.

They waited, tense, for over two hours.

But not even their commander expected the strength of the blasts that came next.

“When the first round came in, it was the loudest, most powerful noise I’ve ever heard,” Garland told AFP.

– Shockwave ‘bowed door’ –

“There’s something unnatural about the air. The way it moved, the way it heated up; the shock wave that came in and bowed the door in and bowed it back out,” he said.

Starting at 1:35am and for the next three hours, around five volleys of ballistic missiles slammed into the base at varying intervals.

“I have not been that scared for a long time. It’s been a while,” said Garland, who has served multiple tours in Iraq.

“We didn’t know what it was going to look like — if there was going to be a carpet bombing effect,” he added.

When the strikes quietened around 4:00am, commanders and soldiers emerged from their bunkers to fires burning across the base, more than a dozen impact sites but — miraculously — no casualties.

Two soldiers who had been in guard towers were blown out of their positions but only suffered concussion, the commander said.

“How they survived was a miracle of God,” Garland remarked.

He said the volleys that hit the base were timed in such a way as to trick soldiers into thinking the bombing was over.

“It was just enough time to make you feel safe. It was my opinion that it was intended to inflict casualties,” said Garland.

Hossein Salami, commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, said on Sunday the missiles it fired in the early hours of Wednesday were not aimed at killing American personnel.

By Monday, most of the impact sites had been cleared.

A bulldozer was piling up the last of the twisted metal and debris from the last site, located by the base’s airfield.

A soldiers’ living quarters had been totally pulverised and still smelt of charred metal.

Soldiers who lived there told AFP they had lost all their personal belongings — clothes, books, pictures of their families and mementos they had carried through more than a decade in the military.

But given the intensity of the strikes, Garland said, they were lucky.

“Theatre ballistic missile strikes. That’s unprecedented,” he said.

Source: AFP