She calls them the words nobody ever wants to hear.
Yes, we know your loved one boarded the aircraft. No, they’re not in any of the local hospitals. We are waiting for word from the medical examiner on a positive identification.
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For more than a dozen years, Sharon Bryson waited with shocked and anguished people whose loved ones had fallen victim to a big transportation disaster — usually a major plane crash.
“I’ve been there in the middle of the night with a family member when things have gone wrong,” said Bryson, who spent a decade leading the family assistance program at the National Transportation Safety Board before being promoted last year. “And I’ve seen the look on the faces of people who have paid the price for things that have not been right in the system.”
Her job grew out of what may have been the worst post-airline disaster debacle of all time.
TWA Flight 800 lay in thousands of pieces in the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island in 1996. And with it were the bodies of 230 people whose flight to Paris had gone drastically wrong.
The bankrupt airline flew in family members, depositing them in a Ramada hotel near John F. Kennedy International Airport. But after that, they got little information about the crash or the remains they’d come to take home. When politicians got TV time with their status reports on the recovery of bodies, family members who felt left in the dark exploded.
“People were screaming for information,” one family member told Newsweek. “You get five versions of everything.”
Magnified by the glare of the New York media, the angry families caught the attention of people who had just experienced similar frustrations after losing family members in two other big accidents — the crashes of USAir 427 near Pittsburgh and ValuJet 592, which went down in the Everglades.
“I still have the images at all three accidents of the families standing outside telling the media ‘We don’t know anything,’ ” recalled Bryson, 53, who then worked at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
The next year she had a new job, in an office where people weren’t sure she’d fit in.
Congress had responded to the distress of families by creating what is now the Office of Transportation Disaster Assistance and squeezing it into the federal agency whose sole role had been to find the cause of transportation disasters.
“She came to an agency of investigators who were somewhat skeptical of providing family assistance,” said Deborah A.P. Hersman, chairman of the NTSB. “She really turned an organization of investigators around, and they’re now very proud of it.”
This year, Bryson is a finalist for a Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Award medal in career achievement. The awards, presented annually by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, will be announced at a dinner Thursday in Washington.
“It was fascinating to me to see how she was able to work in the different worlds,” said Paul Sledzik, who worked under Bryson and then took over TDA when she was promoted to deputy director. “She’s briefing the family members, speaking with them one-on-one to meet their concerns, meeting with the air carriers, making sure that victim identification is moving along smoothly, keeping an eye on the personal-effects process, and keeping the board members and our investigative people informed.”
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