4 Dead in Train Collision in Suburban Los Angeles
Posted by Crillmatic in Miscellaneous, Travel
Stewart Cook/Reuters
LOS ANGELES — A freight train collided with a rush-hour commuter train in suburban Los Angeles on Friday evening, killing four people and injuring dozens of others, many of them critically. The crash was potentially one of the worst in recent history in Southern California.
Firefighters, using large cranes and ladders, swarmed a toppled passenger car, smashing windows and frantically trying to extract injured passengers as a fire burned under the car of the Metrolink train. A spokeswoman for Metrolink said that roughly 350 people may have been on the late-day train.
The cause of the crash was not immediately apparent. Denise Tyrrell, a Metrolink spokeswoman, told The Associated Press, “We don’t know if we hit another train or another train hit us.”
The accident happened just after 4:30 p.m. in the Chatsworth area of the San Fernando Valley, north of downtown Los Angeles. Swaths of red, yellow and green tarps were spread out several yards from the trains, some covered with injured passengers. The engine of the Union Pacific freight train, lying along a 90-degree curve of the track, appeared smashed beyond recognition.
D’Lisa Davies, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Fire Department, in an interview with the local NBC affiliate, said the fuel from the trains presented a possible hazard.
The Metrolink train originated in Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, and was headed to Moorpark, a suburban area served by many train lines. The crash occurred near an elementary school, and witnesses ran from the area to assist firefighters.
Stacy Sullivan, who was up the hill from the area of the crash, told television reporters she heard a tremendous boom, then saw billows of black smoke. Ms. Sullivan said she made her way down the hill to help passengers.
Ambulances lined a nearby park as workers tried to find passengers; the dead were removed from the scene and the injured were whisked to area hospitals.
The crash was near the 118 Freeway. Metrolink trains have begun to carry more passengers than usual in recent months as gas prices have climbed.
The most deadly crash in the history of the Metrolink, the regional rail services for Southern California, was in 2005 near Glendale, where 11 people were killed and nearly 200 were injured when two trains collided with a Union Pacific freight train. The crash occurred when one train hit a Jeep Cherokee abandoned on the tracks by Juan M. Alvarez, who said he had planned to commit suicide but changed his mind and tried to move the Jeep before the train struck it. Prosecutors charged him with 11 counts of murder, and Mr. Alvarez was convicted last June.
Television cameras captured a male passenger being removed an hour after the crash from a hole in the side of the train and set into orange stretchers. He was set to rest near an engine while firefighters moved back to the ladders to pick slowly through the wreckage in hopes of finding more victims alive.
Greg Miller, a motorist, told KNX-AM radio that he was driving near the scene when he heard a loud boom. “I thought somebody blew something up,” Mr. Miller said. “It was really loud.” He said he did not immediately grasp that it was trains colliding but soon a plume of black smoke signaled the disaster.
People lined a street in Chatsworth, frantically calling on their cellphones, trying to get word on family members who were on the train.
The toppled car was a mangled mass of steel and smoke, with seven freight cars derailed and others standing on either side. (NYTimes.com)
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