Philly Runners, Doctors React To Boston Marathon Blasts
Since Philly is just down I-95 from the Boston area, you can imagine that quite a few local runners were at the Boston Marathon on Monday when twin explosions happened at the finish line.
CBS Philly reports that racers and their families felt a mixture of joy and survivor’s guilt:
Melinda Hill, from Wynnewood, Pennsylvania was there to support her twin sister, who had worked for four years to finally qualify for Boston and had just finished the marathon, a few minutes before the blasts.
“You know the euphoria, ‘oh my God, she finished!’ You know, ‘great!’ Congratulating everybody. And then it’s gone. And so, she had all these mixed feelings, because you know this was her first Boston Marathon. She worked for four years to qualify for that and so it was really — you know, how do you feel? Because, it’s a tragedy, but so many people have worked just to get to that point.”
Another racer, Doug White with the Delaware Sports Club, ran his 40th and final Boston Marathon today.
He told Action News he was 6/10ths of a mile away from the finish line when everything stopped.
“Everyone came to a halt like on I-95, heavy traffic, of course, nobody knew. Nobody knew for about 15 minutes. The only thing you knew was there were ambulances and fire trucks and every kind of cop car in the world running all over the place. We didn’t know what happened,” White said.
For 28 years, Dr. Howard Palamarchuk has taken his Temple University School of Podiatric Medicine students to the Boston Marathon.
Palamarchuk and his students were set up inside a medical tent just half a block past the finish line, which was the site of the first explosion and a little more than a block away from the second explosion. Nobody was expecting what came through that tent.
“There were horrendous injuries. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. I mean, it was like war.”
“It was just obscene, I mean to do this to families. It was just a day of celebration for families. So seeing kids injured, seeing children peppered with shrapnel, and adults, and grandmothers. I don’t know much about ordnance, but this was meant to kill and maim, absolutely.”
Inky:
Emily Russo, 20, a Haddonfield High School graduate, had just cheered as her Tufts University schoolmates passed the 26-mile mark. She turned her back to leave when the ground shook.
Russo and her friends joined hands and ran. She looked back and saw smoke billowing over a high-rise building.
“I started to cry,” she said. “That’s when it really hit me. That freaked me out. I just saw my two friends run by. I was scared, thinking the worst – that they’d gotten hurt.”
