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Spain Train Crash: 80 Dead & 131 Injured!
A Spanish train that hurtled off the rails in Santiago de Compostela and smashed into a security wall as it rounded a bend, was going so fast that carriages tumbled off the tracks like dominos. Killing 80 people, according to eyewitness accounts and video footage obtained Thursday.
An Associated Press analysis of video images suggests that the train may have been travelling at twice the speed limit for that stretch of track.
Spain's government said two probes have been launched into the cause of Wednesday night's crash near this Christian festival city in northwest Spain. The Interior Ministry raised the death toll to 80 in what was Spain's deadliest train wreck in four decades, while 95 remained hospitalised, 36 in critical condition, among them four children.
Emergency personnel respond to the scene of a train derailment.
/AP Photo/ El correo Gallego/Antonio Hernandez
One local official described the aftermath of the crash, on the eve of one of Europe’s biggest Christian festivals, as like a scene from hell, with bodies strewn next to the tracks. The impact was so huge one carriage flew several metres into the air and landed on the other side of the high concrete barrier.
There were 94 injured, 35 of those were in a serious condition, including four children, the deputy head of the regional government said on Thursday.
“We heard a massive noise and we went down the tracks. I helped get a few injured and bodies out of the train. I went into one of the cars but I’d rather not tell you what I saw there,” Ricardo Martinez, a 47-year old baker from Santiago de Compostela, told Reuters. El Pais newspaper said one of the drivers told the railway station by radio after being trapped in his cabin that the train entered the bend at 190 kilometres per hour. An official source said the speed limit on that stretch of twin track, laid in 2011, was 80 kph.
The crashed train with dead bodies placed on the side tracks.
AP Photo/ El correo Gallego/Antonio Hernandez
Spanish media said the train had two drivers aboard and both survived.
However, Galician court officials said the train had only one driver. Court spokeswoman Maria Pardo Rios said the driver survived and was expected to give a statement to police later Thursday. She declined to name the driver but said he was not being treated as the suspect of a crime.“We’re only human! We’re only human!” the driver told the station, the newspaper said, citing sources close to the investigation. “I hope there are no dead, because this will fall on my conscience.”
Newspaper accounts cited witnesses as saying one driver, Francisco Jose Garzon, who had helped rescue victims, shouted into a phone: "I've derailed! What do I do?".
The 52-year-old had been a train driver for 30 years, a Renfe(Spain Train service) spokeswoman said. Many newspapers published excerpts from his Facebook account where he was reported to have boasted of driving trains at high speed. The page was taken offline on Thursday and the reports could not be verified.
Renfe said the train came off the tracks on a bend about 3 or 4km (2-2.5 miles) from Santiago de Compostela station at 20:41 local time (18:41 GMT) on Wednesday. Both Renfe and state-owned Adif, which is in charge of the tracks, had opened an investigation into the cause of the derailment, Renfe said.
It was on the express route between the capital, Madrid, and the ship-building city of Ferrol on the Galician coast, with 218 passengers on board – in addition to an unknown number of crew members. Firefighter Jaime Tizon, one of the first to reach the site of the crash, described the scene as "hell". "I'm coming from hell, I couldn't tell you if the engine was on fire, or one of the carriages or what…" he told after dragging the injured and bodies from the train.
Investigators were trying to urgently establish why the train was going so fast and why fail safe security devices to keep speed within permitted limits had not worked.
Spain’s rail safety record is better than the European average, ranking 18th out of 27 countries in terms of railway deaths per kilometres travelled, the European Railway Agency said. There were 218 train accidents in Spain between 2008-2011, well below the European Union average of 426 for the same period, the agency said.
Feature Image: A picture taken on July 24, 2013 shows a fireman carrying an injured young
AFP PHOTO / LA VOZ DE GALICIA / XOAN A. SOLER / MONICA FERREIROSXOAN A. SOLER,MONICA FERREIROS/AFP/Getty Images
Video Courtesy : Associated Press
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