If Tuesday’s fiery wreck involving a passenger train and a truck in Southern California had occurred five years ago, more people likely would have been injured, and some might have died, officials with the commuter service said.
Some of the Metrolink cars in the crash were equipped with collision energy management technology — implemented after a 2008 Chatsworth, California, crash between a freight train and a Metrolink commuter train that left 25 people dead.
No one died in this wreck, which happened before sunrise when the driver of a produce truck allegedly mistook the train tracks for the road and tried to turn onto them. But at least 28 people were injured, including three in critical condition.
The train cars are relatively new and the safety features are much better at absorbing the impact of a crash than older trains.
“We can safely say that the technology worked,” Metrolink spokesman Jeff Lustgarten told reporters. “It minimized the impact of what (could have been) a very serious collision. It would have been much worse without it.”
The front end of the car that hit the truck is designed to crumple and disperse the energy of the collision, he said.
The train cars are equipped with windows that emergency personnel can easily remove to evacuate passengers, he said. An hour after the crash, “a vast majority, if not all” of the passengers had been evacuated, and the injured were treated on the scene or transferred to hospitals.
Lustgarten said all of the service’s cab cars — which have a compartment for an engineer — and two-thirds of its passenger cars have the new technology.
The National Transportation Safety Board has been called in to investigate the accident. The NTSB will try to determine how fast the train was going when it approached the truck and its trailer. In a written statement, the agency said the train could have been going as fast as 79 mph during that part of its trip.
The driver of the train, who was in the cab car, was able to hit the brakes, Lustgarten said.
The train wasn’t equipped with positive train control, which can automatically stop a train. Lustgarten said Metrolink was already planning to add the technology within months.
Truck driver found a mile away
The incident occurred just before 5:45 a.m. between the cities of Oxnard and Camarillo. Authorities said the 54-year-old produce truck driver from Arizona turned onto the tracks instead of at the nearby road intersection just beyond.
Some time after the accident, A police officer driving near the scene of the accident spotted the driver walking along a road at least a mile away and stopped to talk to him, Oxnard Assistant Police Chief Jason Benites said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon. The driver was disoriented, Benites said.
The driver was hospitalized and questioned by investigators. Benites said the man, who drives for a company in Yuma wasn’t under arrest and is cooperating.
Emergency personnel treated many of the 49 people on board on tarps on a road adjacent to the tracks, video from CNN affiliate KABC showed.
The produce truck, which was hauling a trailer, was “fully engulfed,” in flames, according to the California Highway Patrol. A fire official said the fire trucks arrived within five minutes of the 911 calls.
Four cars derailed, leaving three on their side, the NTSB said. The locomotive, which was pushing the train and was at the rear, appeared to still be on the tracks.
Nine patients were taken to Ventura County Medical Center, Dr. Bryan Wong said. Three of the patients — including the engineer — were in critical condition. The conductor didn’t require surgery, Wong said, but injuries to his heart and lungs necessitated constant evaluation.
Wong said doctors were hopeful they would see improvement in his condition over the next two days.
Two women in critical condition both had surgery, Wong said. He said he thought both would make a full recovery.
Deadly crossing
The accident occurred at a crossing where two people died in June and where the city of Oxnard wants to build a bridge over the tracks, Mayor Tim Flynn said.
But the $30 million cost is a lot for a city his size, he told CNN’s “The Lead With Jake Tapper.” He called on Congress for some funding help for this crossing and others throughout the United States.
The NTSB said Tuesday than more than 2,000 crossing grade accidents occur each year and 239 people were killed in such incidents last year.
“We are very concerned about grade crossings, and we intend to use this accident and others (like a deadly one in New York earlier this month) to learn from it to keep it from happening again,” Robert Sumwalt of the NTSB said.
In the New York crash, six people died when a passenger train hit an SUV on the tracks near Valhalla. The collision caused a fire that burned the SUV and the first train car.
