Sometimes the words are worth a thousand pictures.

I learned about this morning's local tragedy from my Flist. Two EMTs, one still here, one far away. Both have worked in that area. Neither would have had anyone to rescue.

On went the television, just in time for me to see Channel 7 Eyewitless News reliving its glorious "blaze-buster" past and doing scattershot interviews with random passersby.

I couldn't take it. This is the largest single one-time taker of life in Western New York in anyone's memory.

So I went about my business, including a noon doctor's appointment. In Clarence. (Far from the scene, and I'm fine, apparently.)

On the way, though, I heard this interview with the widow of the lone fatality on the ground. She'd been in the house, too. You just have to- HAVE TO- hear her.

There isn't a live link on the WBEN website; I'm sure the hotlinks would have broken it. So they just download you the .mp3, which I saved here.

God almighty. This woman, who just lost her husband and barely escaped death when a plane practically landed on her HEAD, sounds as calm, and brave, and strong as anyone I have ever heard under anything close to these circumstances.

Oh, and the radio reporter who interviewed her? Who'd been on the beat since word of the crash came late last night when nobody knew whose house had been hit? She's related to the family. Because this is Buffalo, where the only weird thing about "six degrees of separation" is that usually it turns out to be more like THREE degrees.

My prayers are with that family, and the families of the victims of the air, and the first responders who kept this from being an even bigger tragedy if that fire had gotten out of control.

Okay, make that ONE degree.

The names are starting to come out.

Of course I know one of them.

Susan Wehle was Cantor at the temple I pass at least twice a day on my way to work, Wegmans and whatnot.

She was brilliant, talented, funny and incredibly tolerant of the young teenage Methodists who visited one of her bar/bat mitzvahs every year.

The Buffalo News has yet to publish anything other than her name. The Rochester D&C has this:



Hours before she boarded doomed Continental Flight 3407 for Buffalo, Susan Wehle called the administrator at her Amherst temple to say she had had a wonderful Caribbean vacation abroad and, “I’m coming home energized, said Temple Beth Am President David Bergash.

The 55-year-old Wehle, a mother of two and longtime cantor at the temple, had spent 11 days in Costa Rica in an effort to escape the biting Buffalo winter, Bergash said.

As cantor for 11 years, Wehle was a fixture in the temple. She orchestrated the musical portions of its services and was active in its religious school, where she taught music and the tenets of Judaism, Bergash said.

“We thought of her as one of our clergy,” Bergash said. “She helped run the services, organize hospital visits, bar mitzvahs, bat mizvahs. You name it. She did it.”

Bergash said the temple administrator, Rick Ellis, was to pick Wehle up from the airport and that she had called him to say that her flight would be delayed.

“She was very close to all the congregants,” Bergash said. “She was a people person.”

Wehle is survived by two sons, Jonah and Jacob, Bergash said.

She is also survived by her close friend, the Rev. Gail Lewis, who is currently recuperating in the Caribbean. And surely, suddenly, in need of more.

Are you there, God? It's us, Buffalo.