(The following article was posted to Los Angeles television station NBC 4’s website on June 22.)
COMMERCE, Calif. — As crews continued to clear debris from Friday’s train derailment Sunday, railroad officials and experts said their only other option was a risky chase-and-capture maneuver using a locomotive.
Officials and experts believe the only other way to stop the runaway cars would have been to chase after them in a locomotive in an attempt to recouple the cars and halt their journey. But just such a request was denied by railroad dispatchers barely minutes after the cars started rolling free, the Los Angeles Times reported.
“If they’d got it before it left the yard, if they could have been hooked up to a locomotive, that would have been fine,” said Robert Campbell, lead investigator of the accident for the National Transportation Safety Board. “But once the cars got out of the yard, they had too much speed and weight. It would have been a death wish.”
The Times also reported that investigators are leaning towards human error as the cause of the accident, but have not ruled out other causes such as equipment failure. An anonymous source told the Times that two railroad workers — one at the front of the train and one at the rear — each mistakenly thought the brakes had been set by the other.
Commerce city officials Saturday sought answers to why they weren’t notified before the 31 runaway freight cars loaded with lumber derailed in a residential neighborhood, destroying two homes and injuring 13 people. There were also conflicting reports on whether Union Pacific officials meant to derail the freight cars in Commerce or intended to divert the cars into a freight yard about a mile from where they went off the tracks. What is known is that had railroad officials not done anything, the runaway freight cars, traveling at more than 70 mph, were headed toward a freight yard in downtown Los Angeles, where a much greater disaster might have occurred.
“The dispatchers had literally split seconds to decide where to divert the cars, and their main focus was not allowing these cars to go any farther into the downtown area than they could,” Union Pacific spokesperson Mark Davis said.
The aftermath of the disaster — 28 of the 31 cars jumped the tracks — looked like a giant pick-up sticks game, or a tornado’s handiwork. Officials estimated there was more than 3,800 tons of wreckage.
The freight cars started rolling down the tracks at about 11:30 a.m. Friday, but the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department didn’t learn about the situation until 26 minutes later when a resident called 911 just before noon, shortly after the cars had derailed. The fire department received a call two minutes after that.
Officials said it was unlikely that even if the railroad had notified the city that there would have been time to evacuate residents before the train derailed.
As crews Sunday continued to clean up the mess, there was anger that the city had no advance notice, but relief that no one died in the massive crash. Officials said it could take up to a week before all the wreckage could be cleaned up.
Families that fled were allowed back into the neighborhood to see the wreckage Saturday.