Through the mangled steel the shape was clearer now.
I rode across the Argentine, my spokes speaking for me, to the house of a friend: I swam in the sea there, among the mangled steel.
Lieutenant Memmen said that as they were lowered down, the rescuers saw "a lot of debris, a lot mangled steel, the remnants of the catwalks.
Several passengers were trapped in the mangled steel until they were cut free by firefighters, who had to scramble up a steep, snow-covered embankment that hampered rescue efforts.
Fire shot into the sky, and raining from the clouds of dirt and smoke were shell casings and mangled steel and splintered wood.
They are transfixed by the final structural remnant arced from the ground, a mangled writhing upward of a few stories of leaning steel and concrete shreds.
Hard to tell where the sounds were coming from: beams had crashed down into the window, there was nothing but a welter of mangled steel.
In photographs of the aftermath, amid the smoldering mangled steel and body parts of what they call "the pile," the ironworkers look like men working in hell.
The pylons, designed to withstand only 45 millimetres (1.8 in) of ice accretion, buckled and collapsed into twisted heaps of mangled steel.
The cab where he sat was a mass of mangled steel and a spaghetti of exposed wires.