Railway accidents

Citation

(2005), "Railway accidents", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 14 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/dpm.2005.07314eac.003

Railway accidents

12 November 2004Padre Burgos Area, Philippines

Rescuers in the Philippines smashed train windows with axes and hammers today to reach 100 passengers trapped when a carriage derailed and dragged other cars into a ravine, killing at least four people. Police and Philippine National Railways officials said it was too early to pinpoint the cause but track and fittings in the area had been stolen in the past and sold as scrap metal. Many of the 312 people on board were pulled from the wreckage of the early morning accident and rescuers were focusing on the crowded last car. At least 80 people were injured. The train was travelling overnight from Naga City in the Bicol region to Manila, some 300 kilometres to the north-west. Disaster officials said the first report of the accident near Padre Burgos town came at about 0330, local time. Police said five of the train’s eight cars had derailed and tumbled about 40 feet into a ravine that was at least 100 feet deep. The back half of the train was for passengers and the front for cargo.

12 November 2004. At least ten people, including a one-year-old baby, died when a speeding train with more than 300 passengers on board fell into a ravine early today in Quezon Province, south of Manila, the Office of Civil Defence said. OCD administrator Elma Aldea said at least 129 others were injured in the accident that occurred around 0245 today in the area of Duhat village, Padre Burgos town, around 165 km south of Manila. The train’s manifest lists 312 passengers but civil defence officials fear the actual number of passengers could be higher as passengers are usually picked up en route. Rescuers expected more bodies to be retrieved.

12 November 2004. Rescuers in the Philippines have freed more than 100 train passengers trapped after a crowded economy carriage derailed and dragged other cars into a steep ravine, killing at least 12 people. The train’s speed was believed to be a factor in the crash in the central province of Quezon early this morning. Track and fittings in the area had been stolen in the past and sold as scrap metal, railway engineers and disaster officials said. Estimates of the number of people on board ranged from 312 to more than 400. “It’s simply a case of over-speeding,” said Noli Tolentino, a Philippine National Railways maintenance engineer, adding the train could have been travelling at up to 37 mph as it negotiated a sharp curve near the town of Padre Burgos. Another railways official said three theories had been formulated as investigation began to determine the cause of the accident. Human error, mechanical failure and over-speeding were among the possible reasons, he said. Elma Aldea, a civil defence administrator, said the train should have slowed to 12 mph due to missing bolts and wooden planks in the area, which is about 100 miles south-east of Manila. The last four of the train’s six cars plunged about 40 feet into a ravine that was at least 100 feet deep. Villagers, police and soldiers used ropes to reach the wreckage and any tools at hand to get to those trapped inside. The railway company said it was sending a train with cranes to lift the damaged carriages. “It was speeding. Suddenly the lights went out and we felt the train coming off the tracks,” Rolando Cruz, a passenger in the third car from the back, told a radio station. “Our coach overturned three times.” The dead included a one-year-old child. At least 158 people were hospitalised, disaster officials said. Rescuers trimmed thick vegetation and used shovels to dig out the body of a woman pinned under an overturned coach. They were also searching for two passengers who remained unaccounted for and could have been pinned under derailed train cars. The train was travelling overnight from Legaspi City in the Bicol region to Manila, 340 miles to the north-west. A conductor on the second-last coach, Melquiades del Pillar, said there were about 150 people in the fan-cooled economy carriage, which shuddered as it rounded a bend. “It was very quick. I felt like we were being pulled over,” del Pillar said on radio. The engine was still on the track, with two cars on their sides behind it. Police commandeered vehicles to rush the wounded to hospital in Lucena and smaller clinics nearby. “We have sent teams to inspect the tracks to see if there are missing parts because there were instances of theft in that area,” another railway engineer said on radio. The company said the coaches involved in the accident were among 30 second-hand cars donated by the Japanese government in 2000 to help the railway modernise its stock.

15 November 2004. The Department of Transportation and Communication (DoTC) gave a fact-finding team ten days to determine the cause of the train accident in Padre Burgos town, Quezon province, which killed at least six people. In a statement, DoTC Secretary Leandro Mendoza said the probe would determine those criminally liable for the accident before dawn last Friday (12 November). Colonel Lucas Cauton of the DoTC Office of Transportation Security was appointed head of the committee, which was formed on orders of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. “We will bring to justice those who will be found accountable and responsible for this tragic accident and we will prosecute them to the full extent of the law,” Mendoza said. Mendoza said the Philippine National Railways (PNR) Calamba to Bicol route would remain closed until the portion of the railway where the ill-fated train fell was safe. The DoTC chief also ordered all drivers of the PNR as well as the Metro Rail Transit and the Light Rail Transit to undergo drug tests.

14 December 2004Hoshiarpur Area, Punjab State, India

Up to 50 people have been killed and 250 injured in a collision between two passenger trains in northern India. The Jammu Tawi express crashed into a local train in the Hoshiarpur district of Punjab at about noon, an officer said. “The information we have is that 25 to 30 people are dead and more than 250 injured,” said a spokesman at the Punjab police chief ’s office. Agence France-Presse said 50 people were killed and around 150 were injured. The agency quoted Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh on the figures. Officials were unable to say what caused the accident but said there were reports of fog in the morning in that area, according to Northern Railways public relations officer Devender Sandhu. Dharam Singh, the top railway official in the area where the accident occurred, said an express train crashed into a local train, apparently because of a “communications snag” between two station masters who allowed the trains to travel on the same track toward each other. “We will order an inquiry. Only then will we come to know who was at fault,” Singh said. Local resident Pradeep Sharma told Aaj Tak TV news channel that at least two cars of the express train were badly damaged in the crash, which took place near a village railway station. Soldiers from the area were helping emergency workers in the rescue effort, he said.

14 December 2004. At least 38 people died today when two passenger trains collided head-on in India’s northern Punjab state, officials said, revising downwards a previous death toll of 50. Speaking at a hospital in Mukheriyan, the closest large town to the accident, Punjab’s Chief Minister Amarinder Singh told reporters the number of dead was 34. He said figures of 50 dead and 150 injured he had announced to the state assembly earlier were “unconfirmed.” Later, hospital officials in Mukheriyan said another four people had died from injuries and 17 people were in serious condition. Railway officials said there appeared to have been a mix-up that allowed the local train onto the single-track main line at the wrong time. “I don’t consider this to be an accident but murder. It was sheer negligence on the part of the concerned officials,” said Railways Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav after visiting the injured in Mukheriyan. He ordered the suspension of two station masters and a probe into the accident which happened just before midday. He said the station masters could face accusations of “culpable homicide not amounting to murder.” At least four carriages were badly damaged in the collision of an express and local train deep in rural India, 150 km east of the Sikh holy city of Amritsar in the northern state of Punjab. The express train had left Jammu in Kashmir this morning bound for the western city of Ahmedabad. The local train was travelling between Jalandhar and Pathankot.

8 January 2005Crevalcore area, Italy

A passenger train and a freight train crashed head-on in fog-shrouded countryside in northern Italy, about 13:00, yesterday, near Crevalcore, 25 km north of Bologna, on a line running to Verona. At least 14 people were killed but authorities feared the death toll would climb. Some 80 people were injured, about a dozen seriously. The impact derailed one of the engines, while one carriage was thrust into the air and crashed down onto the other train. Fire brigades had earlier said up to 15 people were confirmed dead but later said there was confusion because some of the bodies were dismembered. Six hours after the crash, rescue workers using blow torches and metal cutters were still trying to reach part of the wreckage where they feared more passengers may have been trapped. “We expect to work through the night,” said national fire brigades chief Mario Morcone. “We still have to lift a part of the carriage that was sent flying 10 metres up before it fell and we hope we don’t find other victims in there,” he said. More than 50 people were injured in the collision in the plains north of Bologna. It was Italy’s worst train crash since 1980, when a rail crash killed 20. The freight train was carrying heavy iron construction girders, and the impact of the crash hurled girders like spears into one carriage of the inter-regional passenger train, which was carrying about 100 people. Rescue workers and emergency services battled time and fog to get to the wreckage, which was strewn across a field between the small towns of Crevalcore and Camposanto, north of Bologna. Medics treated the injured on the roofs of the tangled carriages. Mud in the fields alongside the track made it difficult for ambulances to reach the disaster scene and the injured had to be taken on stretchers to roads. Fire brigade officials said thick fog in the flat countryside made it difficult to bring cranes close to the track. Italian railways and magistrates have opened an investigation into the cause of the collision.

9 January 2005Graniteville, South Carolina, USA

Investigators wearing protective suits and oxygen tanks yesterday discovered the body of a factory worker missing since a train carrying chlorine gas wrecked earlier this week, causing one of the nation’s deadliest chemical spills in years. The worker was found inside the Avondale Mills textile plant in Graniteville, where five workers died after being overcome by the fumes. A total of nine people were killed and more than 250 sickened by the toxic vapours. The search for the worker delayed crews patching a hole in the train car that was carrying the chlorine gas when the wreck occurred Thursday (6 January) about ten miles from the Georgia state line. Debris was moved away from the leaking railcar yesterday and about 40 tons of crushed lime was dropped on the ground to begin neutralizing the chlorine, authorities said. Thom Berry, spokesman for the state Department of Health and Environmental Control, said crews would start removing chlorine from two additional railroad tankers in the next couple days. More than 5,400 residents have been forced to evacuate their homes and will not be permitted to return until Tuesday (11 January) at the earliest, officials said. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating what caused the freight train carrying 42 cars to collide with a parked train at a crossing next to the plant, where 400 workers were on the night shift making denim and other fabrics. State and federal environmental officials have conducted air quality tests since the crash and found either low levels of chlorine or none within blocks of the site. Levels at the crash site were higher.

10 January 2005. Crews worked today to neutralise and remove chlorine gas still leaking from a railcar damaged in a train wreck that killed nine people last week and injured hundreds more. A day after patching a breach in the car, crews mixed the toxic gas with sodium hydroxide to turn it into liquid bleach, making it safer to pump it out of the railcar, said Thom Berry, state Department of Health and Environmental Control spokesman. The gas killed nine people, including six workers at a nearby textile plant, and sickened more than 250 after the Norfolk Southern Corp. (NSC) train slammed into parked railcars early Thursday (6 January).Thousands of nearby residents were expected to remain evacuated until Wednesday (13 January) at the earliest. Two other cars containing chlorine gas remain at the crash site, but are not leaking, officials said. They will be emptied before being moved, Berry said. Of the more than 250 people who received treatment after being exposed to the gas, 33 remained hospitalised today, including at least two in critical condition, officials said. An overnight curfew remained in effect for people who refused to leave their homes in the affected area. Investigators determined that the three-man crew that parked a two-car train on a side rail failed to switch the tracks back to the main rail. That sent the oncoming train hurtling into the parked train. Graniteville, about ten miles from the Georgia state line, is in an area where rail switches are controlled manually, said Debbie Hersman, a National Transportation Safety Board spokeswoman. The investigation showed the crew on the moving train applied its brakes before hitting the parked train, she said. Part of the continuing investigation will focus on the recent work history of the crews involved in the crash. The New York Times reported on its web site today that investigators said yesterday night they were looking into whether the crew was distracted or fatigued when it was time to reset the railroad switch.