Amanda Wirag-Oliveira was making dinner for her two young daughters Tuesday night, when the unthinkable happened.
“A plane just crashed into my roof,” she says in the 911 call obtained by NBC Connecticut.
“I heard like whoosh and then the house shook,” said Amanda. “We have plaster on the walls, it came down it hit me and then I fell and I got up and the door of the attic swung open and I heard a guy say, ‘oh (expletive)!’”
It wasn’t until she ran outside with her girls, that she realized what had happened.
“I got to the other side of the road and looked up and saw an airplane handing out of my house.”
Firefighters couldn’t believe their eyes either when they arrived at the scene minutes later.
“I’ve been on the job for 13 years now, and I haven’t seen anything like this—and the guys that were here yesterday were here a lot longer than me and they had not seen anything like this either,” said James Gagliardo of the Danbury Fire Department.
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Securing the scene and recovering the glider was a team effort into Wednesday, as they braced themselves for rain going into the evening.
“PD owns the scene right now, FAA is on scene, NTSB is working with them over the phone,” said Gagliardo. “They’re working with the owner of the aircraft, the property owner, and everybody else to try to do the recovery. The main priority is to make sure that we keep everybody safe.”
Amanda’s priority for now, is her daughters.
“They’re gonna go see their therapist tomorrow because they’re really traumatized,” she said. “The older one is more upset about it happening again, she’s afraid of going back into the house because she’s afraid it’s gonna happen so we’ve been trying to explain to her that it’s once in a lifetime, planes don’t hit houses every day.”
The house has been in Amanda’ family for 55 years. It’s the home her grandparents lived in and where she planned on raising her family for many years to come.
“I can’t even I can’t even explain what I feel, it’s so upsetting.”
She believes the fact she and her kids walked away unscathed after what happened yesterday is no coincidence.
“Thank God we were where we were when the plane hit. I really think that my grandparents and God were definitely watching after us because it could’ve been a lot worse for us and the pilot.”
NBC New York went to the pilot’s home and a woman who answered the door said he would not speak to us. She did say he has stitches in his head and some blurriness of vision.
