Posted on 06/22/2009 2:31:06 PM PDT by Pyro7480
CNN producer Vito Maggiolo saying "one train on top of each other."
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
That is the Western and Central Red Line. This is the Eastern side and is more recent.
Not enough to matter. 31 years vs. 34.
I live in CA but was on the Red Line every day last week, with two of my boys, visiting DC.
So sad. I also missed the Holocaust Museum shooting by just a few days. Guess there was an angel watching over me and my boys last week.
Big city commuters are not callous and insensitive, but it is the first thing that naturally enters the mind when you hear of a mishap. Simply the way it is in commuting areas that are, on a good day, a nightmare.
Sorry you missed the point of the post.
Cool pic. I used to take the Orange from out in virginia down to King St. a lot during the nineties.
I suspect that the budget situation isn’t going to be an issue here, although you are certainly right about the waste.
They’ve had previous incidents that were basically driver/management error - the operator killed on the snowy track at Shady Grove (because the bast**d GM insisted they be on automatic operation), the maintenance worker run over in VA (the operator ignored warnings), and the Woodley Park incident (oops - forgot to set the brake).
We’ll see - I’m probably biased because of the 1 1/2 hour delay I suffered from the EARLIER incident, but my suspicion is that there will be a connection to the Red Line being backed up and somebody got into a rush or a manager got so distracted that they made a fatal error. Sort of like the L-1011 that crashed in the Everglades 30+ years ago - the crew got so distracted by a landing gear issue that they let the autopilot “land” the plane in the Everglades.
I don’t think corruption is the problem. It’s a high maintenance system.
WTOP just reported the number of people killed in today's accident has risen to six.
Count up to 6 fatalities per 8:30p ABC radio news :(
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Just heard on Mark Levin. He says now six dead.
Prayers for all.
You’re welcome - that incident really bothered me; I felt that the Deputy GM (who I misidentified as the GM in my earlier post) had blood on his hands from that one. My heart went out to that poor operator.
I don’t think this will be a money issue, although Metro’s web site admittedly claims that the crashing train “derailed”. We’ll see. I have always felt that Metro never cultivated an environment that encouraged safety - it’s original pitch was that “everything is fail safe computers” and reduced the operating personnel to feeling as if they were just cogs in a machine. Nobody “owns” safety.
I just wanted to see the map of the system again, and I see Metro has a “service status” area. Curious to see how they handle this.
Geesh:
“Disruption at Fort Totten. Trains are turning back at Rhode Island Ave & Silver Spring due to a train experiencing mechanical difficulties outside of Ft. Totten. Shuttle service has been established.”
“Mechanical difficulties”. I’ll say. Disingenuous as Bill Clinton.
Although on the main page, they do have a major alert that people are dead.
Prayers for the people who died and are suffering.
I ride the Red almost everyday to DC, then back again to Shady Grove. Today, I knew something was wrong, because the trains were holding at almost every station. Trains were crowded, but mostly we did not know what was going on until people started getting text messages.
I got calls from work, friends, family and neighbors making sure all was well.
IMO, and for what it's worth, this had to be a signal failure, or human error.
The moving train that hit the stopped train was going really fast. It had to be to end up on top of the stopped train. Messy. Very messy.
More recent? Red Line has been up to Silver Spring (past Takoma) when I was a kid - 1980 we rode from there.
The metro stations were plastered with Obama-related signs from the election through and past the election. Fortunately, I only ride the system maybe twice a year. I couldn’t have handled seeing that every day for 3-4 months. And I certainly don’t recall anything like that for Reagan or either Bush election/inauguration.
I’m pretty sure the Silver Spring station is part of the oldest of the system; I can’t count how many times I’ve ridden path this train took today.
SNIP
UPDATE 6:40 p.m.:
One Red Line train had been stopped on the tracks. It had just begun to move when it was struck from behind by a speeding train.
Brenda Payton was on the speeding train. “We just felt a big crunch and saw smoke and stuff. We got off the train as fast as we could.” Payton is from Fort Washington, and she was heading home. Another woman on that train, Anastasia McKeown, says that just before the impact, the ramming train slowed down. “Then we felt an impact just after that. You could tell we hit something that wasn’t an animal.”
Though McKeown was in the last car, she saw one of the plastic partitions in the ramming train fall on someone’s head. McKeown had back and neck injuries. A triage area for victims has been set up outside Jarvoe Jarboe Printing Co. People there are mostly folks who’ve been injured but are not in critical condition.
As for the stopped train, here’s one account of what happened. Dennis, who declined to give his last name, says his train had just barely started to move when the impact happened. Dennis stepped out of the train and could see “three or four people on the ground, all bloody.” Dennis was in the fifth car, one removed from the impact. After staggering out of the train, he spotted a woman on top of that sixth car, and blood was streaming down. “The interior of that car just got crushed,” said Dennis.
Thanks for the update.
I know from first-hand knowledge that there had been an earlier incident that had the Red Line massively backed up and probably had the nerve center going crazy as it was during the peak of rush hour. The media hasn’t caught on to this yet.
My bet is that somebody got in a hurry, overrode automatic controls, lost track of the trains, etc., etc. So tragic.
In the first car of the six-car Red Line train, on a sunny-day evening commute, passengers heard a message familiar to any Metrorail rider: The conductor said they were holding for a moment -- there was a train ahead.
The train started moving again, picking up to moderate speed.
Then, without even the squeal of brakes as a warning, there was a crash, and the feeling of being lifted up as the train hit one that was stopped.
Inside the car, there was dust and broken glass and blood. Seats had been ripped from the floor and thrown around: One man was trapped between two of them, with a leg that appeared broken. A woman was screaming, invisible, buried beneath a pile of seats.
But the most incredible thing was the floor itself. It was gone, peeled away. Passengers could look down and see the grooved-metal roof of another Metro train.
"The front of the train just opened up," said passenger Marcie Bacchus, 30, who was among a handful of passengers in the car at the center of the deadliest accident in Metro's 33-year history.
The crash happened about 5.p.m., on an above-ground stretch of track that runs through neighborhoods between the Fort Totten and Takoma stations. Authorities said one Red Line train rear-ended another, hitting with such force that its first car was thrown on top of the other train.
Brianna Milstead, 17, a high-school student from Waldorf, was in that car. She could see out the front window, and saw the other train getting closer -- though she saw it too late to react.
"It happened so quick," Milstead recalled, looking at her ash-covered hands. "The floor smushed up. It was lifted up. I saw the debris flying toward me. I was choking on the smoke."
Dave Bottoms, 39, had just left his job as an Army Chaplain at Walter Reed. The Anglican priest was in the back of the front car that slammed into the stopped train. When he saw the train buckling, it looked just like it would in the movies, he said.
"It felt like it was going in slow motion," he said. "I started praying."
In the chaotic moments after the crash, he walked to a young woman who had been pinned in between seats. She was hysterical, he said, but he began calming her--and the other passengers in the car.
The group began saying the Lord's Prayer in unison.
SNIP
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