(The Associated Press circulated the following on September 13. Tim Smith is Chairman of the BLET’s California State Legislative Board.)
LOS ANGELES — The death toll in the collision of a Metrolink train and a freight train reached 25 Saturday and was expected to rise, officials said, as the commuter passenger service announced that a preliminary investigation determined that its own engineer failed to stop at a red light.
More bodies remained in the wreckage of a Metrolink passenger car but it was difficult to determine how many, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told a press conference.
“It’s like peeling an onion,” he said of efforts to get through the wreckage.
A preliminary investigation found “it was a Metrolink engineer that failed to stop at a red signal and that was the probable cause of the accident,” Metrolink spokeswoman Denise Tyrrell said.
Tyrrell said the engineer worked for a subcontractor, Veolia, and had driven Metrolink trains since 1996. She said she believes the engineer, whose name was not released, was killed.
The death toll made it the deadliest U.S. passenger rail accident in 15 years.
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.
Police set up what they called a unification center at a local high school to try to connect worried people with information about friends or relatives who they believed were aboard the train.
Families of eight of the dead had been notified and two women who were pronounced dead at hospitals were unidentified, coroner’s Assistant Chief Ed Winter said.
Firefighters were being rotated in and out of the scene to prevent emotional exhaustion, 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.”
The National Transportation Safety Board, the leader of the probe, announced Saturday it will interview survivors and Metrolink officials and hopes to complete its final report on the accident within a year.
NTSB board member Kitty Higgins said the agency had not ruled out Metrolink’s theory of human error but was waiting to complete its investigation before making any statements about the cause of the accident.
“We know what happened. … These trains collided, but we don’t know why it happened and it’s our job to find out,” Higgins said.
She 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, whether the horn was used.
Tyrrell said she didn’t know if the engineer ever had any problems operating trains or had any disciplinary issues.
“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 told reporters. “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.
“When two trains are in the same place at the same time somebody’s made a terrible mistake,” she said.
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, said issues that could factor into the crash investigation could be faulty signals along the track or engineer fatigue.
“We’ve seen some signal anomalies of late. I’m always suspicious of that,” Smith said.
He said engineers can be on duty up to 18 hours a day, with breaks, though they are legally limited to 12 hours a day running a train.
“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 and conductor had worked.
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 collision occurred on a horseshoe-shaped section of track in Chatsworth at the west end of the San Fernando Valley.
The crash forced the Metrolink engine well back into the first passenger car, and both toppled over. Two other passenger cars remained upright.
By late Saturday 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.
Tyrrell, visibly shaking and appearing near tears as she spoke with reporters, said Metrolink determined the cause of the crash by pouring through dispatch records and reviewing computers.
Investigators quickly learned from those records that the commuter train, traveling along the main line, failed to stop for a red signal. Had the engineer obeyed the signal, she said, the accident would not have happened.
“We don’t know how the error happened,” she added.
Veolia issued a statement Saturday calling the collision a “tragic incident.”
“We are putting every available resource behind the efforts to assist emergency personnel and our client in rescue and recovery efforts,” the statement said. “We will continue to do so.”
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.
In 2002, a freight train hit a Metrolink train in Placentia, killing three people and injuring more than 260.
Until Friday, the worst disaster in Metrolink’s history occurred on Jan. 26, 2005, in suburban Glendale when 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.
That was the worst U.S. rail tragedy since March 15, 1999, when an Amtrak train hit a truck and derailed near Bourbonnais, Ill., killing 11 people and injuring more than 100.
The Sunset Limited was involved in the worst accident in Amtrak’s 28-year history. On Sept. 22, 1993, 42 passengers and five crew members died when the train plunged off a trestle into a bayou near Mobile, Ala. The trestle had been damaged minutes earlier by a towboat.