| Presto | 07-25-2013 08:36 AM |
Horrible Train Derailment in Spain
http://i.imgur.com/xZZKsSS.gif http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2...ent-crash.html Quote:
Police put the driver of a Spanish train under investigation on Thursday after at least 80 people died when it hit a sharp bend at speed, derailed and caught fire near the pilgrimage centre of Santiago de Compostela, in one of Europe's worst rail disasters.
The crash was caused by excessive speed, an official source with knowledge of the accident investigation told Reuters. However, the public works minister has said it's too early to say exactly what happened.
Dramatic video footage from a security camera outside the northwestern city showed the train hurtling into a concrete wall at the side of the track as carriages jack-knifed and the engine overturned.
Officials say the speed limit on that section of track is 80 km/h.
The impact was so huge one carriage flew several metres into the air and landed on the other side of the high concrete barrier.
"We heard a massive noise and we went down the tracks. I helped get a few injured and bodies out of the train. I went into one of the cars but I'd rather not tell you what I saw there," Ricardo Martinez, a 47-year old baker from Santiago de Compostela, told Reuters.
The train driver was under formal police investigation, a spokeswoman for Galicia's Supreme Court told Reuters, without naming him. The train had two drivers and one was in hospital, the Galicia government said.
It was not immediately clear which driver was under investigation or in hospital. The train, operated by state-owned company Renfe, was built by Canadian company Bombardier and Spain-based Talgo and was around five years old. It had almost the maximum number of passengers
El Pais newspaper said one of the drivers told the railway station by radio after being trapped in his cabin that the train entered the bend at 190 km/h. An official source said the speed limit on that stretch of twin track, laid in 2011, was 80 km/h.
"We're only human! We're only human!" the driver told the station, the newspaper said, citing sources close to the investigation. "I hope there are no dead, because this will fall on my conscience."
Investigators were trying to urgently establish why the train was going so fast and why failsafe security devices to keep speed within permitted limits had not worked.
Spain's rail safety record is better than the European average, ranking 18th out of 27 countries in terms of railway deaths per kilometres travelled, the European Railway Agency said. There were 218 train accidents in Spain between 2008-2011, well below the European Union average of 426 for the same period, the agency said.
Cranes were still pulling out mangled debris on Thursday morning, 12 hours after the crash. Emergency workers had stopped their search for survivors, the court spokeswoman said.
Firefighters called off a strike to help with the disaster, while hospital staff, many operating on reduced salaries because of spending cuts in recession-hit Spain, worked overtime to tend the injured.
The disaster happened at 8.41 p.m. local time on the eve of a major festival dedicated to St James, one of Jesus' 12 disciples, whose remains are said to rest in the city's centuries-old cathedral.
The apostle's shrine is the destination of the famous El Camino de Santiago pilgrimage across the Pyrenees, which has been followed by Christians since the Middle Ages.
The city's tourism board said all festivities, including the traditional High Mass at the cathedral, had been cancelled as the city went into mourning following the crash.
In total, 178 people were taken to hospital after the crash, a regional government spokeswoman said. Of those, 95 were still being treated, of which 36 including four children, were in serious condition, she said.
U.S. citizens were amongst the injured, the U.S. Embassy said in a statement and at least one British citizen was wounded, the British embassy spokesman said. Several other nationalities were believed to be among the passengers.
One of the train drivers had been sedated, said Juan Jesus Garcia, the secretary general of the Renfe train drivers union, adding he hoped to visit him on Thursday.
Neighbours ran to the site to help emergency workers tend to the wounded. Ana Taboada, a 29-year-old hospital worker, was one of the first on the scene.
"When the dust lifted I saw corpses. I didn't make it down to the track, because I was helping the passengers that were coming up the embankment," she told Reuters. "I saw a man trying to break a window with a stone to help those inside get out."
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, who was born in Santiago de Compostela, the capital of Galicia region, visited the site and the main hospital on Thursday. He declared three days of official national mourning for the victims of the disaster.
Passenger Ricardo Montesco told Cadena Ser radio station the train approached the curve at high speed, twisted and wagons piled up one on top of the other.
"A lot of people were squashed on the bottom. We tried to squeeze out of the bottom of the wagons to get out and we realised the train was burning. ... I was in the second wagon and there was fire. ... I saw corpses," he said.
Both Renfe and state-owned Adif, which is in charge of the tracks, had opened an investigation into the cause of the derailment, Renfe said.
The official source said no statement would be made regarding the cause until the black boxes of the train were examined.
The disaster stirred memories of a train bombing in Madrid in 2004, carried out by Islamist militants, that killed 191 people, although officials do not suspect an attack this time.
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