Yagielski: 'Destruction, bodies, smoke'

On Monday a community still mourning neighbors who died in the World Trade Center attacks, became the scene of the latest disaster to strike New York. CNN.com's Janine Yagielski walked the streets of Rockaway in the aftermath of the crash of American airlines flight 587.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- "Destruction, bodies, smoke." That's how New York firefighter Sebastian Forera described the scene of the crash of American Airlines Flight 587, in a residential area of the New York borough of Queens.

When Forera arrived, the neighborhood was engulfed in thick black smoke. "You find where you are needed and get to work," he said.

"Hollywood couldn't have dreamed up something like this," he added.

Martha and John Militano, who live one street over from the main crash site, also couldn't have dreamed how their Monday morning would begin.

"At first we thought it was the Concorde, then it just kept coming," Martha said of the noise that sounded like the sonic boom produced by the jets that fly into nearby John F. Kennedy airport.

"It knocked me and my son out of bed," John said.

Martha ran into the street to find out what had happened. A neighbor, who is a firefighter, shouted that he had seen a plane dive nose first into the nearby houses.

As a home four houses down from the Militanos' burst into flame and the power in the neighborhood went out, the family fled their street. They have no idea when they will be able to return.

Eileen and Frank Roberts were also jolted by the noise of the crash.

"We thought it was the start of the [Veterans Day] parade," Frank said.

They soon learned that it was yet another airplane tragedy.

"You want to know was this an accident or was it something else?" Frank said.

That question hangs in the air in the working-class communities where the pieces of the wreckage fell to Earth. Belle Harbor, Rockaway Beach, Breezy Point and the surrounding communities of Queens lost nearly 90 residents in the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center.

"Police and firefighters live here, this is a great neighborhood," said Martha Militano, who moved to the quiet beachside area from Brooklyn five years ago.

Blocks away from the flames and smoke of the main site of the devastation on 131st Street, children played in the fallen leaves filling a back yard. The scene was perfectly normal, except for the piece of a plane laying where it had fallen behind a parked car on Cronston Street, marked off by a single strand of yellow police tape.

"You tell the kids everything will be okay," said one grief counselor at the triage center set up in Belle Harbor School. "You keep thinking this will be the last time. But you know it isn't."