13 Survive Plane Crash; 74 Missing

Rescuers battled thick mud and heavy rain to pull 13 injured oil workers from the wreckage of an Occidental Petroleum plane that crashed in the Amazon jungle and burst into flames with 87 people aboard. The survivors--some seriously hurt--had to be carried three miles on stretchers because driving rain prevented evacuation by helicopter. Company officials said the 13th person was found in the muck nearly 18 hours after the Boeing 737 went down three miles short of the airport at Andoas, an oil camp 650 miles north of the capital, Lima. Despite mud that swallowed some bodies, authorities held out hope that more survivors might be found. But officials also declared the remaining 74 people missing and feared dead. Most of the 79 passengers on the plane, including one American and a Venezuelan, were oil workers employed either by Occidental or local contractors. The flight also carried a crew of eight. The American aboard the plane, engineer Harold Whitehead, was not among those rescued. The cause of the crash was not known.