Amtrak derailment: Train was traveling at 80 mph in 30-mph zone
The train that careened off a bridge outside
Tacoma, Washington, killing three people was traveling at 80 mph on a
30-mph stretch of track, federal investigators confirmed late Monday.
During a late-night briefing with reporters, NTSB board member Bella Dinh-Zarr added that Train 501 of Amtrak's Cascades service from Seattle headed south to Portland, Oregon, was carrying 80 passengers, three crew and two service personnel.
Washington State Police spokesman Dan Hall earlier said that 72 people were taken to hospitals after the 7:33 a.m. PT crash following the opening of a highly touted new rail link. Five cars and a pair of trucks were involved in the highway pileup, but no motorists were killed, officials said.
It was unclear if the dead were passengers or crew. Hall said that 10 of the wounded remained in serious condition and one was medevacked to a trauma center at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, roughly 50 miles away.out the cause, and we encourage others not to speculate as well.”
During a late-night briefing with reporters, NTSB board member Bella Dinh-Zarr added that Train 501 of Amtrak's Cascades service from Seattle headed south to Portland, Oregon, was carrying 80 passengers, three crew and two service personnel.
Washington State Police spokesman Dan Hall earlier said that 72 people were taken to hospitals after the 7:33 a.m. PT crash following the opening of a highly touted new rail link. Five cars and a pair of trucks were involved in the highway pileup, but no motorists were killed, officials said.
It was unclear if the dead were passengers or crew. Hall said that 10 of the wounded remained in serious condition and one was medevacked to a trauma center at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, roughly 50 miles away.out the cause, and we encourage others not to speculate as well.”
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The train was traveling on newly refurbished tracks that are part of a new route designed to offer speedier service south of Tacoma. Some local leaders had expressed concerns about the project, saying it was dangerous for high-speed trains to operate so close to a highway.
Passenger Chris Karnes told MSNBC that the train had just passed the city of Dupont when it jumped the tracks.
"At a certain point the train started to wobble a little bit, and the next thing that we knew we were down in a ditch," Karnes, a member of a local transportation advisory group, said. "The train had crumpled."
In recordings of emergency radio conversations, a member of the train crew told a dispatcher briefly what happened.
"We were coming around the corner to take the bridge over I-5 there, uh, right north of Nisqually and we went on the ground," the crew member said.
By then, rescue workers had started arriving.
"When we got to the scene it was obvious that there were some fatalities and there were a lot of injuries and some people were able to get off the train," Detective Ed Troyer, a spokesman for the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department, told reporters. "Multiple cars and trucks were struck by train cars that left the train tracks and went down onto the road."
One witness, Kolter Raudebauga, told NBC affiliate KING that the train seemed to have "nosedived," leaving it "dangling off the ramp there, off the track."
Another witness, Dan Konzelman, told MSNBC that he climbed onto the tracks after the crash and joined others helping victims while waiting for emergency crews to arrive.
"Some of them couldn’t move they had neck or back injuries, so we assigned people to stay there with them and keep them calm," Konzelman said. "And then we worked our way down to more serious injuries where people were pinned underneath the trains that had flipped upside down, and unfortunately there were some deceased."
Amtrak service south of Seattle was temporarily suspended, the company said.
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Don Anderson, mayor of Lakewood, a city along the new route, said he was among many in the area concerned about the speed of the trains that would be traveling through their communities. He said he
was part of an unsuccessful bid to stop the switch, or change it.
"Our community has been very concerned about the safety of this modification of the rail route for several years," Anderson told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell.
President Donald Trump first tweeted that the crash was a reason to support his planned infrastructure bill.
The president soon followed up by tweeting: "My thoughts and prayers are with everyone involved in the train accident in DuPont, Washington. Thank you to all of our wonderful First Responders who are on the scene. We are currently monitoring here at the White House."
On the prior route, along the Puget Sound, an Amtrak Cascades service train derailed in July with 267 people on board as it approached a drawbridge, leaving several injured.
On Monday night, another Amtrak train traveling from Chicago to San Antonio, Texas, slammed into a semi-truck south of Austin, though none of the 150 passengers or crew on board were injured, NBC affiliate KXAN reported.
A spokesman for Union Pacific, which owns the railroad tracks the train was traveling on, told the station the truck did not clear the area before it was struck. The rear of section of its trailer was destroyed.
Monday's Washington State crash was the first railway accident with multiple fatalities since May 12, 2015, when an Amtrak train derailed outside Philadelphia, killing eight people and injuring more than 200. Three months before, a Metro-North Railroad train hit an SUV on a crossing in Valhalla, New York, killing the car's driver and five on the train.
