[ad_1]
JOPLIN, Montana – A team of investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board was on the site of an Amtrak derailment in northern Montana that killed three people and seven were hospitalized on Sunday, officials said.
The Empire Builder headed west was en route from Chicago to Seattle when it left the tracks near Joplin, a town of about 200 people, at around 4 p.m. on Saturday.
Trevor Fossen was the first to arrive. The resident of Joplin was on a dirt road near the tracks on Saturday when he saw “a wall of dust about 100 meters high”.
“I started looking at it, wondering what it was, and then I saw that the train had overturned and derailed,” said Fossen, who called 911 and tried to get people out. He called his brother to bring ladders for people who could not come down after getting out of the windows of cars on their sides.
The train carried about 141 passengers and 16 crew members and had two locomotives and 10 carriages, eight of which were derailed, said Amtrak spokesman Jason Abrams.
A 14-person team, consisting of investigators and railway signal specialists, would investigate the cause of the derailment on a main track on the BNSF railway that had no other trains or equipment involved, said NTSB spokesman Eric Weiss.
Law enforcement said officers from NTSB, Amtrak and BNSF had arrived at the scene of the accident west of Joplin, where the tracks run through huge fields of golden brown wheat that were recently harvested. Several large cranes were put on the tracks roughly parallel to US Highway 2, along with a truckload of gravel and new railroad ties.
Several wagons could be seen on their sides.
The scene of the accident is about 241 kilometers northeast of Helena and about 48 kilometers from the Canadian border.
Amtrak CEO Bill Flynn expressed condolences to those who have lost loved ones, saying the company is working with the NTSB, the Federal Railroad Administration and local law enforcement agencies to share their “sense of urgency” to determine what’s happened.
“The NTSB will investigate the cause or causes of this accident and Amtrak is committed to taking appropriate action to prevent a similar accident from occurring in the future,” Flynn said in the statement.
Montana Governor Greg Gianforte said BNSF will prepare a replacement route if the NTSB gives the go-ahead. “BNSF has assured me that they can get the line up and running in a short amount of time,” he said.
Railroad safety expert David Clarke, director of the Center for Transportation Research at the University of Tennessee, said accident scene photos show the derailment occurred on or near a switch where the railroad changes from a single track to a double track.
Clarke said the two locomotives and two cars at the head of the train reached the split and continued on the main track, but the remaining eight cars derailed. He said it was unclear whether some of the last cars moved into second lane.
“Did the switch play a role? It could be that the front of the train was pushing on the switch and there was fishtailing and the back of the train overturned, ”said Clarke.
Another possibility is a defect in the splint, Clarke said, noting that regular testing doesn’t always reveal such problems. He said speed is not a likely factor as trains on this route have systems in place that prevent excessive speeds and collisions.
Matt Jones, a spokesman for the BNSF Railway, said at a press conference that the line on which the accident occurred was last inspected on Thursday.
Because of the derailment, the Empire Builder heading west from Chicago ends in St. Paul, Minnesota on Sunday, and the eastbound train will begin in Minnesota.
Most of the people on the train were treated and discharged for their injuries, but five who were more seriously injured remained at the Benefis Health System hospital in Great Falls, Montana, said Sarah Robbin, Liberty County’s emergency services coordinator. Two were in intensive care, said a hospital spokeswoman.
Another two people were at Logan Health, a hospital in Kalispell, Montana, said spokeswoman Melody Sharpton.
Robbin said the emergency services had unsuccessfully struggled to cut open cars with special tools, “so they had to manually move many of the passengers who couldn’t walk.”
Liberty County Sheriff Nick Erickson said the names of the dead would not be released until relatives were notified.
Robbin said local residents rushed to offer help when the derailment occurred.
“We are fortunate to live where we live, where neighbors help neighbors,” she said.
“The locals were so amazing and accommodating,” said passenger Jacob Cordeiro on Twitter. “They provided us with food, drinks and wonderful hospitality. Nothing like it when the best comes together after a tragedy. “
Cordeiro, who is from Rhode Island, just graduated from college and traveled to Seattle with his father to celebrate.
“I was sitting in one of the front cars and we were jostled hard, thrown from one side of the train to the other,” he told MSNBC. He said the car left the tracks but didn’t fall over.
“I’m a pretty big guy and it lifted me off my chair and threw me into one wall and then the other wall,” Cordeiro said.
Chester councilor Rachel Ghekiere said she and others helped about 50 to 60 passengers taken to a school.
A grocery store in Chester, about five miles from the derailment, and a nearby religious community provided groceries, she said.
Allan Zarembski, director of the University of Delaware’s Railway Engineering and Safety Program, said he didn’t want to speculate but suspected the derailment was due to a problem with the railroad, equipment, or both.
After the nationwide introduction of positive train control, the railways “practically eliminated” major derailments caused by human error, said Zarembski. He said NTSB results could take months.
Bob Chipkevich, who oversaw the investigation of rail accidents at the NTSB for several years, said the agency won’t rule out human error or other possible causes for the time being.
“There are still human performance issues that are being studied by NTSB to ensure that the people doing the job are skilled, rested and doing it right,” Chipkevich said.
Chipkevich said track conditions have been a major cause of train accidents in the past, noting that most of the tracks Amtrak uses are owned and depend on rail freight companies for safety maintenance.
___
Bellisle reported from Seattle and Snow from Phoenix. Associated Press writers Tom Krisher in Detroit and Michelle Liu in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed to the coverage.
___
This story was corrected to show that the train was going from Chicago to Seattle. Also corrects Minneapolis to St. Paul, Minnesota, which is where the Amtrak train station is.
[ad_2]
