As the investigation into the deadliest incident in the history of New York’s Metro-North Railroad got under way on Wednesday, officials said they still could not explain how or why a sport-utility vehicle became stranded on the train tracks.
A crowded commuter train travelling north through Westchester County slammed into the SUV on Tuesday night, setting off a devastating explosion and fire that killed six people – five train passengers and the driver of the car. Fifteen people were being treated at local hospitals, state officials said.
Governor Andrew M Cuomo, appearing on several morning television interviews, said there was significant traffic near the railroad crossing where the incident happened and that it did not seem that the woman driving the vehicle, a black Jeep Cherokee, was trying to beat the train at the crossing at Lakeview Avenue in Valhalla, New York.
Instead, he said, it was more likely that she was somehow confused. Earlier in the evening, there had been an accident on a nearby highway, the Taconic State Parkway, and as a result drivers seeking less congested routes had moved onto side streets in nearby towns. About 6.30pm (11.30pm Irish time), there was a line of cars on Commerce Street leading back onto the Taconic and a witness watched as the woman in the SUV found herself on the wrong side of the crossing bar as it went down.
“It looks like where she stopped she did not want to go on the tracks, but the proximity of the gate to her car, you know, it was dark – maybe she didn’t know she was in front of the gate,” Rick Hope, who said he was in a car directly behind the woman and backed up to give her room to do the same, told a local Fox affiliate WNYW.
He said that the woman instead drove forward, only to find herself stuck on the tracks. Mr Cuomo said it could not have been in a worse place. “That SUV was right in the middle of the track and was hit directly in the middle of the car by the train,” he said. While the investigation was in its early stages, one person briefed on the matter said that it appeared that the woman was outside her car frantically waving at the train to stop at the time of crash.
The train pushed the SUV about 400 feet (122 metres), the governor said. “And 400 feet down, it was still on the middle of the track,” Cuomo said. “It wrapped around the train and exploded.” It also caused the electrified third rail to tear from the tracks and rip through the first car in the train. “This was as gruesome as I have seen,” Cuomo said.
The Westchester County executive, Rob Astorino, arrived at the Westchester medical examiner’s office, on the same campus in Valhalla as the medical centre, in the late morning to offer support for the families of the victims. A spokesman for Astorino, Ned McCormack, said that “all but one of the bodies was charred beyond recognition” and that officials were waiting for dental records. “You have to make a positive ID,” he said.
In the moments after the crash, witnesses described a horrifying scene in the first car of the train, which quickly became filled with smoke and flames. One witness, Chris Gross, appearing on ABC’s Good Morning America, said he had been watching a Mel Brooks movie in the front car when suddenly the train was jolted.
“People started falling over each other,” he said. He was tossed into the aisle and saw flames, and he heard a man in front of him screaming. “I turned over and looked,” Mr Gross said. The man in front of him “lost his leg below his knee.” In the chaos, he said, a man who had burns on his hands managed to pull the emergency latch so they could escape. The man with the burns, Gross said, plunged his hands in the snow, hoping for some relief.
On Wednesday morning, the smell of smoke still filled the air as investigators combed over the wreckage. Metro-North has been under intense scrutiny after a series of crashes that killed six people in less than a year, including a derailment in 2013 on the Hudson line that left four commuters dead in the Bronx. A federal report released last year was highly critical of Metro-North.
A team from the National Transportation Safety Board arrived at the crash site on Wednesday morning and took over the investigation. Speaking to reporters before leaving, Robert L Sumwalt, a member of the board, said a full investigation would take about a year, though if the safety board’s findings warrant “immediate attention”, it can issue an urgent safety recommendation far more quickly.
“At this point, everything is on the table. Nothing is off the table,” Mr Sumwalt said. In particular, investigators will focus on the crossing arms, rail traffic signals and highway signals; each device has “a recorder on it”, Sumwalt said. The recorders have been secured and will be studied by experts, he added. – (New York Times service)