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| First responders gather at the derailment of a Metro North passenger train in the Bronx borough of New York Sunday, Dec. 1, 2013 The Fire Department of New York says there are "multiple injuries" in the train derailment, and 130 firefighters are on the scene. Metropolitan Transportation Authority police say the train derailed near the Spuyten Duyvil station. |
NEW YORK (AP)
-- A New York City commuter train rounding a riverside curve derailed
Sunday, killing four people and injuring more than 60 in a crash that
threw passengers from the toppling cars and left a snaking chain of
twisted wreckage just inches from the water.
Some
of the roughly 150 passengers on the early morning Metro-North train
from Poughkeepsie to Manhattan were jolted from sleep around 7:20 a.m.
to screams and the frightening sensation of their compartment rolling
over on a bend in the Bronx where the Hudson and Harlem rivers meet.
When the motion stopped, four or five of the seven cars had lurched off
the rails. It was the latest accident in a troubled year for the
nation's second-biggest commuter railroad, which had never experienced a
passenger death in an accident in its 31-year-history.
"Four
people lost their lives today in the holiday season, right after
Thanksgiving," Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at a news conference. Eleven of
the injured were believed to be critically injured and another six
seriously hurt, according to the Fire Department.
The train operator was among the injured, Cuomo said.
The
governor said the track did not appear to be faulty, leaving speed as a
possible culprit for the crash. But he noted that the National
Transportation Safety Board would determine what happened. The Federal
Railroad Administration was also sending 10 investigators to the scene.
Metropolitan
Transportation Authority Chairman Thomas F. Prendergast said
investigators would look at numerous factors, including the train, the
track and signal system, the operators and speed.
The
speed limit on the curve is 30 mph, compared with 70 mph in the area
approaching it, MTA spokeswoman Marjorie Anders said. The train's data
recorders should be able to tell how fast it was traveling, she said.
One
passenger, Frank Tatulli, told WABC-TV that the train appeared to be
going "a lot faster" than usual as it approached the sharp curve near
the Spuyten Duyvil station, which takes its name from a Dutch word for a
local waterway, sometimes translated as "Devil's whirlpool."
The
train was about half full at the time of the crash, rail officials
said, with some passengers likely heading to the city for holiday
shopping.
Joel Zaritsky was dozing as he traveled to a dental convention.
"I
woke up when the car started rolling several times. Then I saw the
gravel coming at me, and I heard people screaming," he told The
Associated Press, holding his bloody right hand. "There was smoke
everywhere and debris. People were thrown to the other side of the
train."
Nearby residents awoke to a
building-shaking boom. Angel Gonzalez was in bed in his high-rise
apartment overlooking the rail curve when he heard the roar.
"I thought it was a plane that crashed," he said.
Mike
Gallo heard the same noise as he was walking his dog. He looked down at
the tracks and "knew it was a tragedy right away. I saw injured people
climbing out of the train."
Within minutes,
dozens of emergency crews arrived and carried passengers away on
stretchers, some wearing neck braces. Others, bloodied and scratched,
held ice packs to their heads.
Firefighters
shattered windows of the toppled train cars to reach passengers, and
they used pneumatic jacks and air bags to make sure they uncovered any
victims who might have been pinned by train seats or other objects.
Police divers searched the waters to make sure no one had been thrown in. Other emergency crews scoured the surrounding woods.
Federal investigators planned to turn the cars upright to be certain no one was trapped beneath.
Three
men and one woman were killed, the MTA said. Three of the dead were
found outside the train, and one was found inside, authorities said. The
victims' names had not yet been released.
Edwin
Valero was in an apartment building above the accident. At first, he
said, he didn't notice that the train had flipped over.
"I didn't realize it had been turned over until I saw a firefighter walking on the window," he said.
To
Cuomo, "it looked like a toy train set that was mangled by some
super-powerful force," the governor said in a phone interview with CNN.
As
deadly as the derailment was, the toll could have been far greater had
it happened on a weekday, or had the lead car plunged into the water
instead of coming to rest on its edge.
"On a
workday, fully occupied, it would have been a tremendous disaster," New
York City Fire Commissioner Salvatore Joseph Cassano told reporters at
the scene.
For decades, the National
Transportation Safety Board has been urging railroads to install
technology that can stop derailing caused by excessive speed.
A
rail-safety law passed by Congress in 2008 gave commuter and freight
railroads until the end of 2015 to install the systems, known as
positive train control. They use GPS, wireless radio and computers to
monitor trains.
Aimed at preventing human
error - the cause of about 40 percent of train accidents - they can also
prevent trains from colliding, entering tracks undergoing maintenance
or going the wrong way because of a switching mistake.
But
the systems are expensive and complicated. Railroads and their allies
in Congress are trying to push back the installation deadline another
five to seven years.
Metro-North is in the
process of installing the technology. It now has what's called an
"automatic train control" signal system, which automatically applies the
brakes if an engineer fails to respond to an alert that indicates the
speed is excessive.
Such systems can slow
trains in some circumstances, but not bring them to a halt, said Grady
Cothen, a former Federal Railroad Administration safety official.
It's possible, but very unlikely, that the accident was caused by a brake failure, Cothen said.
Trains
rely upon an air brake system that automatically stops the train if the
brakes suddenly lose air pressure, he said. If the brakes were
gradually failing, the train engineer should have had plenty of warning
in time to stop the train, he said.
Amtrak
Empire service was halted for hours between New York City and Albany but
resumed Sunday afternoon, with some delays. Amtrak said its Northeast
Corridor service between Boston and Washington was unaffected.
It
was not clear when service would resume on the affected part of
Metro-North's Hudson line, which carries about 18,000 people on an
average weekday morning.
Westchester County
Executive Rob Astorino said contingency plans were in the works for
Monday morning rush hour, possibly using buses.
Sunday's accident was the second passenger train derailment in six months for Metro-North.
On
May 17, an eastbound train derailed in Bridgeport, Conn., and was
struck by a westbound train. The crash injured 73 passengers, two
engineers and a conductor. Eleven days later, track foreman Robert Luden
was struck and killed by a train in West Haven, Conn.
In July, a freight train full of garbage derailed on the same Metro-North line near the site of Sunday's wreckage.
"Safety is clearly a problem on this stretch of track," state Sen. Jeff Klein, who represents the nearby area, said Sunday.
Earlier
this month, Metro-North's chief engineer, Robert Puciloski, told
members of the NTSB investigating the May derailment and Luden's death
that the railroad is "behind in several areas," including a five-year
schedule of cyclical maintenance that had not been conducted in the area
of the Bridgeport derailment since 2005.
The
NTSB issued an urgent recommendation to Metro-North that it use
"redundant protection," such as a procedure known as "shunting" in which
crews attach a device to the rail in a work zone alerting the
dispatcher to inform approaching trains to stop.
