A man wearing a makeshift mask approaches the flaming tail section of a DC-9 aircraft that crashed during takeoff in Goma, a city in eastern Congo, on April 15, 2008 (see map).

"Fire was really at first the most immediate and greatest threat," said Michael Davie, a freelance correspondent in Goma.

"One of the tragic, and also touching, sights I saw was dozens of Congolese women filling up plastic buckets of water from taps nearby and running with them to lines of men, who had formed a kind of human chain into the wreckage," Davies said.

"These people were trying to douse the flames with water from buckets. There is no infrastructure here to speak of—there's no emergency services—so this is how people were dealing with this major catastrophe—with buckets of water."

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