From People Magazine Heroes Among Us:

STEELWORKERS IN ILLINOIS
Braving a fiery wreck, they pull victims out alive

Just before 10 p.m. on March 15, the Birmingham Steel plant in Bourbonnais, Ill., shook with a deep ramble. No one on the night shift seemed concerned; steel mills often reverberate with "wet charges"—-explosions set off as chunks of scrap metal, moist from sitting outdoors, strike the furnace where they're melted down. But this time was different. Crane operator Mark Lapinsky peered outside the plant grounds and to his horror saw a jumble of railroad ears engulfed in fire and smoke. He sprinted to the shipping office.

"Amtrak wreck! Call 911!" he screamed, then ran through the plant summoning coworkers. Heading south from Chicago with 216 people aboard, the train, the City of New Orleans, had collided at a crossing with a truck carrying 18 tons of steel. Driver John Stokes, 58, escaped with cuts and bruises, but 11 people on the train died and 116 were injured. (The cause of the crash remains under investigation.) Terrible as the toll was, it would have been worse but for Lapinsky and 34 fellow steelworkers. "They were the major heroes," says Bourbonnais Fire Chief Mike Harshbarger. "They were there first, willing to wade into the mess."

When Lapinsky reached the crash site, 100 yards from the mill, he found people crawling out of a ditch, drenched in water and blood. "Out comes a crew member holding a little girl," he recalls. "He hands her to me and tells me to get help. I look down, and her left foot is missing." Lapinsky wrapped her wound in his jacket until he spied a nurse. (Though the girl, Ashley Bonnin, 8, of Nesbit, Miss., survived, her mother, June, 46, was killed, along with a cousin and two friends, all between the ages of 8 and 11.) Crane operator Dale Winkel, 41, and shipping clerk Joe Brown, 29, joined Lapinsky in pulling out survivors as fire spread through the wreckage. At one point, passenger Greg Herman, 40, of Memphis crawled out, handed off Kristen, his 8-year-old daughter, then raced back to the sleeping car where his wife, Lisa, 39, and their other children, Kaitlin, 5, and David, 3, remained. Lapinsky, Brown and Winkel intercepted him. "One of them said, 'You can't go in there,' " Herman recalls. "I grabbed him and said, 'My wife and kids are in there.' He said, 'Let's go.' " The steelworkers crawled in and got out Herman's family, all of whom suffered only minor injuries. "They wouldn't be alive today if it weren't for them," Herman says of the steel men.

Moments later, the plant's night supervisor Bob Curwick, 39, and millwright Jack Casey, 41, entered the dining car to find Susan Falls, her right leg crushed by debris. Falls told them her husband, John, and their 19-year-old daughter Jennifer were somewhere inside. At the time of the crash, the family had been eating cheesecake. Afterward, Falls, 46, called out their names but heard nothing. "I'm not going to make it," she told Curwick and Casey. "If you're going to die, I'm going to die with you," Curwick replied. "And I'm too ornery to die." John, 56, had escaped on his own, and after searching the car, Curwick was startled when a hand reached out from a pile of tables and chairs and grabbed his ankle. It was Jennifer, who has Down's syndrome, immobilized by fractures of the ribs and spine. Curwick and Casey stayed with mother and daughter as the flames drew closer and firefighters cleared debris. Finally a hose appeared, and water came pouring in ("The sweetest sound I ever heard," says Casey).

On the scene until 3:30 a.m., the steelworkers took the next day off. When they returned, they met with counselors and talked of their trauma—especially the lives they couldn't save. "There were a bunch of tough guys in there," says Casey. "But there were plenty of tears."