(The Trenton Times posted the following story by T.A. Parmalee on its website on July 16.)
TRENTON, N.J. — Galete Levin was on her way back to Brooklyn College on Monday morning, seated between two strangers in an NJ Transit rail car and pondering her upcoming bar exam.
The next thing the 25-year-old Lawrence resident knew she was pleading to God for her life and clutching the hand of the woman beside her.
The man seated on the other side had jumped up and was screaming for everyone to stay still so the car they were in wouldn’t overturn.
Levin and her two new friends were among 1,200 passengers on express train No. 3920, bound from Trenton to New York’s Penn Station along the Northeast Corridor Line, when two of the cars began having obvious problems.
The car they were riding in – the sixth of 12 on the train – was passing over a bridge adjacent to the New Jersey Turnpike in the remote Meadowlands of Secaucus.
Levin knew there was going to be “imminent” trouble as the car passed over the bridge, she said. The whole car began to shake, the lights went out and people started to scream, she said.
“I just remember looking at the water below, and the terror hit me,” she explained. “You felt it go off the rails. You didn’t know where you were going to end up, and I was praying. People were screaming and you could hear the terror.”– — —
When the car eventually left the tracks, it hung precipitously from a steep embankment, Levin said.
The man beside her screamed for people to remain still, and passengers were terrified, Levin said. “There was complete and utter mayhem,” she said.
Levin said she believed she was going to die.
As the train lurched over the bridge, she heard a man repeating over and over again: “They gotta slow this down.”
The rail car made it over the bridge before it came to a stop, but once it did, passengers could not get out of the car, which she said was hanging at about a 45-degree angle over the embankment.
No NJ Transit workers were helping victims, and passengers were left to help each other, with no direction from anyone, Levin said.
Though passengers in her car were afraid to move at first, they soon realized they had to escape because the car could roll down the embankment or burst into flames.
Passengers got out a door with the assistance of two male riders who steadied and, in some cases, carried the victims, Levin said.
No NJ Transit employees were outside waiting. But someone did tell them to go back into the train after they had left – so they could get out on the other side, Levin said.
“I am still infuriated at the way things were handled,” she said. “It seemed like utter mayhem at the time.”– — —
Mark Ellison, 42, of Yardley, Pa., was on the car just behind Levin’s, which also left the tracks.
Ellison, who works in New York City, was not injured in the derailment, but was shaken up and angry at NJ Transit. He drafted a letter and e-mailed a copy to The Times.
“Conductors were nowhere to be seen during the evacuation of the train, and in our car had not even come (through) our car to check passes the entire ride,” he wrote. “I did not even see one conductor going around to check on passengers.”
He said riders saw “parts flying off the train” as they looked out at the water from their windows.
“We were about two seconds from falling off the bridge,” he said.
A woman sitting next to Ellison, whose name he did not know, escaped from a window and “fell a good distance,” injuring her back, he said.
“And during the entire ordeal, there was not one person walking around with a bullhorn or a person who looked like they were in charge of the situation,” he said.
Eventually, Ellison was picked up by a train and heard an announcement that medical personnel would be standing by when they arrived at Penn Station.
“But when we got off the train, there was no one anywhere,” he said. “The woman who hurt her back, I had to walk up with her to an Amtrak policeman’s desk and explain to him what was going on. He looked like I was bringing him news.”– — —
Not everyone was brought by train to Penn Station. Ellison watched as a group of about 300 or 400 people starting marching down the tracks of the crash site to a Secaucus transfer station under construction about a half-mile away from the derailment site, he said.
Levin was one of those people. She said when she “saw the herd starting to move,” she followed, her whole body aching.
“One of the passengers said we are supposed to walk – start walking,” she said. “Even the walk itself for me was scary. It didn’t seem like a place where people were supposed to walk, and they had us walking over water.”
When they arrived, there were no ambulances and no one administering medical treatment to the injured passengers, Levin said.
At the station, the passengers waited on a platform about 15 minutes before boarding a “rescue train,” where they sat for about 30 minutes before it backed up to the crash site and picked up the other passengers, Levin said.
“Why couldn’t they do the same for us?” Levin asked yesterday. “Why did they have to make us walk?”
Still, there was no medical attention given to the passengers. “I remember someone saying: `Aren’t they going to give us drinks or something?’ ” Levin said.
Levin, who had left the Princeton Junction Station before 7 a.m., arrived at Penn Station about 10:30 a.m. and made it to her class at Brooklyn College – 90 minutes late.
Though she later sought medical treatment at the University Medical Center at Princeton and was wearing a neck brace yesterday, Levin said she had to make it to her class. “This was my last class for the bar,” she said. “This isn’t a joke where you can just go home.”
One of the many things that bothered Levin about the derailment is she believes NJ Transit knew something was wrong with the train.
Shortly after the train left the Princeton Junction station, it stopped for about five minutes. “They stopped and said they were having some problems,” she said. “They said, `We will resume as soon as the problem is fixed.’ “