Metrolink: Engineer's error caused wreck

Search to recover bodies ends; death toll rises to 25

By GILLIAN FLACCUS - Associated Press | Saturday, September 13, 2008 10:34 PM PDT ∞

LOS ANGELES ---- A commuter train engineer who allegedly ran a stop signal was blamed Saturday for the nation's deadliest rail disaster in 15 years, a wreck that killed 25 people and left such a mass of smoldering, twisted metal that it took nearly a day to recover all the bodies.

A preliminary investigation found that "it was a Metrolink engineer that failed to stop at a red signal and that was the probable cause" of Friday's collision with a freight train in the San Fernando Valley, Metrolink spokeswoman Denise Tyrrell said. She said she believes the engineer, whose name was not released, is dead.

"When two trains are in the same place at the same time somebody's made a terrible mistake," said Tyrrell, who was shaking and near tears as she spoke with reporters.

Authorities later announced that the effort to recover bodies had ended, with the death toll at 24. It rose to 25 when USC Medical Center spokeswoman Adelaide DeLaCerda said a 50-year-old man transported to the hospital from the wreck died Saturday. She would not release his name.

"It was a very, very difficult operation," Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said. "It was like peeling an onion to find all the victims there."

A total of 135 people were injured, with 81 transported to hospitals in serious or critical condition. There was no overall condition update available Saturday, but a telephone survey of five hospitals found nine of 34 patients still critical. Many were described as having crush injuries.

Firefighters who extricated the dead from the wreck were rotated in and out of the scene to prevent emotional exhaustion, fire Capt. Armando Hogan said.

"There are some things we are trained for, there are some things I don't care what kind of training you have, you don't always prepare for," Hogan said. "This situation, particularly early on, with people inside the train, with the injuries, and with people moaning and crying and screaming, it was a traumatic experience."

Firefighter Searcy Jackson III, a 20-year veteran and one of the first to pull bodies from the wreckage, said he had never seen such devastation. He said his team pulled one living passenger from the train and cut about a half-dozen bodies out the mangled metal.

"The metal was pushed together like an accordion," said Jackson, 50, who returned to the scene Saturday after working 12 hours and getting less than five hours of sleep.

The collision occurred on a horseshoe-shaped section of track in Chatsworth at the west end of the San Fernando Valley, near a 500-foot-long tunnel underneath Stoney Point Park. There is a siding at one end of the tunnel where one train can wait for another to pass, Tyrrell said.

"Even if the train is on the main track, it must go through a series of signals and each one of the signals must be obeyed," Tyrrell said. "What we believe happened, barring any new information from the NTSB, is we believe that our engineer failed to stop ... and that was the cause of the accident.

"We don't know how the error happened," she said. Tyrrell said Metrolink determined the cause by reviewing dispatch records and computers.

At a news conference late Saturday, National Transportation Safety Board member Kitty Higgins said it was too early to determine the cause of the crash but noted that a pair of "switches" that control whether a train goes into a siding were open. One of them should have been closed, Higgins said.

"The indication is that it was forced open," possibly by the Metrolink train, Higgins said of one of the switches.

Higgins said rescue crews on Saturday recovered two data recorders from the Metrolink train and one data recorder and one video recorder from the freight train. The video has pictures from forward-looking cameras and the data recorders have information on speed, braking patterns and whether the horn was used.

Investigators also will test the signals on the track and the brakes on the trains as well as interview Metrolink dispatchers.

The Metrolink train, heading from Union Station in downtown Los Angeles to Ventura County, was carrying 220 passengers, one engineer and one conductor when it collided with the Union Pacific freight, with a crew of three, about 4:30 p.m. Friday. The passenger train was believed to have been traveling about 40 mph.

The crash forced the Metrolink engine well back into the first passenger car, and both toppled over. Two other passenger cars remained upright.

Dozens of firefighters swarmed the wreckage just after dawn Saturday and attempted to winch the Metrolink passenger car up with bulldozer buckets and blocks of railroad ties to extract a man's body. At one point, the firefighters grasped the man, who appeared to be pinned from the waist down, by the wrists and swung his torso back and forth to try to free his body.

Two hours later, the man's body was carried out in a white body bag after firefighters used heavy welding equipment to free it from the wreckage.

By late morning, the Metrolink engine had been pulled out of the mangled passenger car, which was raised by a crane and surrounded by tarps. Bulldozers pulled away chunks of metal.

Police set up what they called a unification center at a high school to try to connect worried people with information about friends or relatives who they believed were aboard the train.

The county coroner's office had identified most of those killed in the collision late Saturday. Among them were a Los Angeles police officer and two 18-year-old students.

Tyrrell, the Metrolink spokeswoman, said the engineer had driven the agency's trains since 1996 and worked for a subcontractor, Veolia, since 1998. She said she didn't know if the engineer ever had any previous problems operating trains or had any disciplinary issues.

Veolia issued a statement Saturday calling the collision a "tragic incident." The company said it is cooperating with NTSB's investigation.

Ray Garcia, a train conductor with Metrolink until 2006, said he knew the engineer involved in the crash for nine years and called him qualified and talented. He declined to name the engineer.

"I'm very sad that that happened," Garcia said. "It's terrible."

Garcia said he knows the stretch of track where the collision occurred and believes engineers are warned twice with yellow lights before reaching a red light at the end of a siding.

Tim Smith, state chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, a union representing engineers and conductors, said issues that could factor into the crash investigation could be faulty signals along the track or engineer fatigue.

He said engineers in California are limited to 12 hours a day running a train, although that can be broken up over a stretch as long as 18 hours.

"Doing that for five or six days in a row, you have the cumulative fatigue factor that becomes are real bear," he said.

It was not immediately clear how many hours the train's engineer had worked.

Metrolink launched its service in Southern California in 1992. More than 45,000 commuters board Metrolink trains weekdays in Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

Until Friday, Metrolink's worst disaster was on Jan. 26, 2005, in suburban Glendale, where a man parked a gasoline-soaked SUV on railroad tracks. A Metrolink train struck the SUV and derailed, striking another Metrolink train traveling the other way, killing 11 people and injuring about 180 others. Juan Alvarez was convicted this year of murder for causing the crash.

Friday's train crash was the deadliest since Sept. 22, 1993, when the Sunset Limited, an Amtrak train, plunged off a trestle into a bayou near Mobile, Ala., moments after the trestle was damaged by a towboat; 47 people were killed.