Railway accidents

Citation

(2006), "Railway accidents", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 15 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/dpm.2006.07315cac.008

Railway accidents

12 March 2005Thua Thien-Hue Province, Vietnam

At least 11 people were killed and around 200 injured when a north-south express train was derailed in central Vietnam today, officials said. A nationwide broadcast of state-run Vietnam Television (VTV) showed two carriages that had been thrown off the track and left lying on the bank of a lake. Eight of the train’s 13 carriages had been derailed, it said. “The train was running too fast,” a Vietnamese witness said in the broadcast. “Shortly later we heard a loud sound. We ran and started breaking windows to get out the injured people.” VTV said the military were using boats to rush the injured to hospitals in Hue city. Officials said around 200 survivors had been hurt. About 30 of the injured were in a critical condition, said railway officials and rescue workers in Phu Loc district in the central province of Thua Thien-Hue, 400 miles south of Hanoi. Police and railway officials were investigating the cause of the accident. The train left Hanoi yesterday with 500 passengers and a 27 crew of 29 on what would have been a 1,000 mile, 29-hour journey to the commercial southern hub Ho Chi Minh City. The accident blocked the line and brought other trains to a halt. An official from the state railway authority told VTV rescue workers were working to ensure traffic resumed tomorrow.

14 March 2005. The death toll from a train accident in central Vietnam has climbed to 13 and dozens of injured passengers are still being treated in hospital. Railway officials say traffic will resume by midday (local time), a day after a north-south express train derailed 650 km south of Hanoi. Two of the train’s 13 carriages were flung from the track. Doctors at hospitals in the nearby cities of Hue and Danang say a total of 55 passengers have been admitted for treatment.

15 March 2005. Vietnamese police said over-speeding is attributed to the train derailment in central Thua Thien Hue on March 12, which is considered the most tragic rail accident in Vietnam in the past 30 years. After probing into the train’s black box, the police concluded that the train was running at a speed of 68 kmh just before the accident occurred, instead of 40 kmh as stipulated, local newspaper Transport reported today. The accident killed 11 local people, severely injured 70 others, damaged eight out of 13 compartments, and blocked other trains from running for 26 hours. It occurred in Phu Loc district when the train with 500 passengers and 29 staff was travelling from Hanoi capital to Ho Chi Minh City.

16 March 2005. Police have arrested the driver of a train that derailed on the weekend, killing 11 people in Vietnam. Bui Thai Son has been charged with violating railway regulations and disregarding the speed limit, leading to grave consequences. He has been remanded for four months by a court in the central province of Thua Thien-Hue. Son reportedly admitted his mistake, saying that after he noticed the high speed it was too late to apply the brakes. The train was reported to have been travelling at 69 km/h, nearly double the limit. Eight of the train’s 13 carriages derailed and the track was blocked for a day.

21 April 2005Samlaya Station, Gujarat State, India

A passenger train collided with a stopped goods train in western India today, killing at least 11 people but authorities said dozens more were feared dead. Casualty reports varied widely as rescue teams reached the site of the early morning crash in Gujarat state and began removing the dead and injured from the crumpled wreckage. “Eleven bodies have been recovered. Not more than 20 are feared dead,” state police chief A.K. Bhargava told Reuters. However, another police officer said dozens were feared killed in the crash and state Chief Minister Narendra Modi told NDTV television news more than 80 may have died. National Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav said rescue workers had removed the bodies of the passenger train driver, his assistant and some passengers after the crash at Samlaya station, about 30 km north of the industrial town of Baroda. “The goods train was parked on the track when the Varanasi-Ahmedabad Express hit it,” Yadav said. “One of the cars is badly stuck at the bottom, we have to find out the casualties from that car. It could have been a signal problem, but we’ll have to investigate.” At least four cars of the passenger train, called the Sabarmati Express, jumped the tracks after the collision. Officials said 50 injured passengers had been treated at the scene before being sent to hospitals. Television reports said the train was packed with young people on their way to sit tests for coveted railway jobs. The train had been travelling from the northern holy city of Varanasi to Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s main city.

21 April 2005. At least 17 people were killed and around 150 injured when a passenger train collided head-on with a freight train in western India, police and officials said. “So far 17 bodies have been recovered. Rescue operations are on. There might be more bodies,” Bhagesh Jha, district magistrate of Vadodara, also known as Baroda, in Gujarat state, said today. Gujarat police chief A.K. Bhargav put the number of injured at 150, of whom 27 were in serious condition. The dead and injured had been removed from three of the coaches while troops and civilian volunteers were searching through the wreckage of the fourth, Kumar said, adding there were fears the death toll could rise. According to a television report, the lever used for changing tracks was found broken but this was not immediately confirmed by officials.

Aviation

20 February 2005Collision in mid-air, Southern Germany

Families of victims who died in a mid-air collision in Swiss-controlled airspace over Germany in 2002 have filed a civil suit against Skyguide in Spain. The claim also demands that Bashkirian Airlines, which operated one of the two aircraft involved in the crash that killed 71 people, pay out damages to the families. The suit was expected and Skyguide, the Swiss air traffic control agency, was informed on January 27 according to spokeswoman Rosemarie Rotzetter. The claim is being made in the name of 27 families represented by American law firm Podhurt. Skyguide did not reveal how much the claimants were demanding, although it is believed to be significantly higher than earlier settlements. Some victims families reached a settlement with Skyguide last June and will receive a six-figure dollar sum, thought to be around $150,000. The air traffic control agency signed an agreement with the fight crew’s families in November 2003. The suit was filed in Barcelona, as Spain was the final destination of one of the aircraft, a Bashkirian Tupolev passenger jet. The other aircraft, a DHL cargo aircraft, was travelling from Italy to Belgium. The two aircraft collided in Skyguide controlled airspace over southern Germany on 1 July 2002, near the town of Uberlingen. The crash killed all those on board, including many children. A report from Germany’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau published last year partially blamed Swiss air traffic control, but it also said that the crash was caused primarily by human error. The report found that the controller gave the aircraft instructions to avoid a collision only 43 seconds before impact. It added that the crew of the Bashkirian Airlines passenger aircraft obeyed the controller’s instruction to descend, but failed to listen to their on-board collision warning system, which advised them to climb. Skyguide came in for criticism for having only one controller in charge of air traffic surveillance at the time of the crash. The company has since admitted its responsibility for the chain of the events that led to the accident. Investigations in Switzerland and Germany are still under way.

11 March 2005Crash, Urus-Martan Area, Chechnya, Russia

A Mi-8 helicopter fell in Chechnya after it touched an electro-transmission line, a member of the investigating team told Itar-Tass today. After the fall, the helicopter slid 200 m on the ground and exploded. The crash killed 15 people, including seven personnel members of the Federal Security Service’s Khabarovsk territorial department. One severely injured in the crash is now in hospital. Legal proceedings have been instituted in connection with the crash under the Criminal Code article on “violation of the flight regulations.” The flight recorders have been found. The information recorded by the devices will help to establish the crash cause. The rescue operation has ended at the site 10 km from the regional centre of Urus-Martan at the present time. The investigating team of the military prosecutor’s office is continuing working. Work has begun to repair the electro-transmission line. A team of repair workers has arrived at the site. Urus-Martan and neighbouring settlements were left without electricity for all of last night.

17 March 2005RA-46489

Twenty-eight people were killed yesterday when a plane crash-landed and burst into flames in Russia’s far north, Emergencies Ministry officials said. They said 24 passengers and crew survived the crash but ten of them were in serious condition in a nearby hospital where they were taken by helicopter. “Our figures put the number of dead at 28 and the injured at 24,” a spokesman for the Emergencies Ministry told Reuters. There were 52 people on board the An-24 plane, officials said. Officials had earlier said the numbers of dead were higher, but revised the figures after rescue workers arrived, some by helicopter, at the remote crash site. The plane, carrying mainly oil workers, caught fire after its wing clipped the ground when attempting a forced landing near the town of Varandei in the Nenets autonomous region, said rescue officials. It was not clear why the plane was forced to land. News reports quoted aviation officials as saying the aircraft was in a good condition, although not new, and that the crew was experienced. Lukoil, Russia’s largest oil company, said at least some of the passengers were its employees, but it had no information on casualties. Russian news agencies said crash investigators were on their way to search for the “black box” flight recorders from the aircraft, which came down some 5 km short of Varandei’s airport and was almost entirely destroyed by flames.

22 February 2005EX-037

After over two weeks of efforts, the Afghan government has retrieved 46 bodies from the snow-covered crash site of a jetliner that crashed near Kabul with 104 people on board early this month, an Afghan official said today. “So far 46 bodies have been recovered and the search operation is still going on,” Zahir Azimi, spokesman of Afghan Defence Ministry told journalists at a news conference this evening. Of these recovered, the identity of eight passengers including two women and three children has been determined and their remains will soon be handed over to their families, he noted. A three-member Italian forensic team is assisting Afghan authorities to verify the identities of others through DNA tests. Harsh winter and persistent heavy snowfall over the past three weeks has hampered the rescue and search operation in the crash area, where the wreckage was located on an icy mountain 9,992 feet above sea level.

11 March 2005. Afghan authorities have completed their search for the bodies of more than 100 people who died last month when an airliner slammed into a mountain during a snowstorm, an official said today. Defence Ministry spokesman Mohammed Zahir Azimi also said the final death toll from the February 3 crash could also rise to 106 – two more than originally announced – because one or two small children were also feared among the passengers. “They were only marked by an ‘x’ on the passenger list,” Azimi told a news conference. Afghan troops returned to their barracks yesterday after weeks of searching for the remains of the up to 98 passengers and eight crew, including more than 20 foreigners, when the Boeing 737 struck a snowy peak 20 miles east of the capital Kabul. Azimi said that authorities believed they had recovered remains of all the victims, but that identifying them was proving very difficult. The bodies of five Afghan victims were handed over to relatives at a hospital in Kabul yesterday, bringing the total released so far to 16. DNA samples from dozens more have been sent to Italy for testing. The first results are expected next week. The foreign passengers included nine Turks, six Americans, three Italians and one Iranian. A Canadian citizen and several Russians were believed to be among the six-strong crew. American investigators have joined the effort to find out why the plane, operated by private Afghan airline Kam Air, crashed in Afghanistans worst air disaster. The plane went down in a blizzard after the pilot approached Kabul airport on a flight from the western city of Herat. The data recorder has been recovered, but the voice recorder has yet to be located.

9 March 2005Crash, Tlapa, Mexico

A federal government helicopter searching for gunmen protecting drug plantations crashed into a mountain in southern Mexico today, killing all nine soldiers and two pilots onboard, authorities said. The crash occurred in the isolated mountains near the town of Tlapa, about 130 miles south-east of Mexico City. The cause was under investigation, but another federal helicopter flying in the region earlier was hit by gunfire from the ground, according to a statement from the federal attorney general’s office. The pilot of that first chopper was able to land without incident at a nearby airstrip. The second chopper, a Bell 212 carrying a military officer, eight soldiers and two pilots from the attorney general’s office, took off to find the gunmen. It crashed at about 14:00 hour near the village of Igualita, 20 miles south-east of Tlapa in Guerrero state, the statement said.

25 February 2005Crash into sea off Penghu Island, Taiwan

A small crack, caused when the tail of a Boeing 747 struck a runway on takeoff from Hong Kong in 1980, probably caused a China Airlines craft to break up in midair in 2002, killing 225 people, investigators in Taiwan said today. The crack deteriorated over two decades because it was not repaired in line with Boeing’s repair manual, the Taiwan Aviation Safety Council said. The plane finally came apart, and Flight 611 plunged into the ocean about 50 km off the coast of Taiwan on 25 May 2002, just as it had reached cruising altitude after taking off from Taipei. The report confirmed the suspicions of investigators that not only had the repair been handled improperly, it involved covering the area with an aluminium plate that hid the crack’s slow growth to about 180 cm, or nearly six feet.

28 February 2005Helicopter ditched into North Sea

A report published into a North Sea helicopter crash off the Norfolk coast which killed 11 people says the crew could not have prevented the accident. The Sikorsky S76 came down in July 2002 as it ferried men between North Sea gas installations. There were no survivors among the nine passengers and two crew. The accident is blamed on the failure of the rotor assembly blade. During the investigation it was established that the blade had been hit by lightning three years earlier. This had further weakened a manufacturing fault, causing a crack which was not picked up on inspection.

18 March 2005N875JX

A BAe Jetstream 31 (N875JX), which crashed in northeast Missouri last year, killing 13 people, continued a steady descent less than 300 feet off the ground when it should have been levelling off, according to federal safety investigation records released today. Documents from the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation into the October 19 crash of the Corporate Airlines aircraft also showed the aircraft experienced no apparent mechanical failure or maintenance problems. The aircraft clipped treetops before crashing on private property in a wooded area near Kirksville Regional Airport. Two passengers survived what was the deadliest civilian airline crash in the nation last year. Flight data suggests the aircraft’s approach to the airport was routine until just seconds before the it crashed about 1 mile short of the runway. Records released today reach no conclusions about what caused the accident. That determination will come later, after the agency completes a final report on the investigation. “It looks like a constant descent, and he should have levelled off, but he didn’t and we don’t know why,” said Bill Waldock, an aviation safety professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona. While the cause of the crash remains a mystery, investigators have said the aircraft lacked an updated system that warns pilots when they fly too low, having an earlier version. The Federal Aviation Administration has ordered the new warning system installed by March 29 in commercial aircraft with at least six seats. Several lawsuits have been filed over the disaster, including at least one that alleges the two pilots had been on duty for 14 hours and 41 minutes at the time of the crash. That is below the current FAA standard of 16 hours, but beyond American Airlines’ 14-hour limitation.

18 March 2005RA-46489

A flight data recorder recovered from the aircraft (RA-46489) that crashed in the Russian Arctic suggests there were no mechanical problems with the An-24 aircraft before it went down Wednesday (March 16) near an oil port, killing 28 people, the transport minister said today, according to a report. The 1980s-era two-engine turboprop aircraft crashed near Varandei in the Nenets autonomous region on the Pechora Sea shoreline, some 1,100 miles north-east of Moscow. Twenty-four passengers and crew survived in subzero temperatures. Officials had said the crash could have been caused by pilot error or a technical malfunction. But Transport Minister Igor Levitin told the Interfax news agency that initial results from an examination of the cockpit voice recorder found in the wreckage “did not show that there were technical problems or an equipment failure on board during the approach to landing.” Levitin said the other recorder, which stored data from the aircraft’s controls, was in extremely bad condition because the wreckage burned, and it might not be possible to recover information from that machine. Citing eyewitnesses, officials said the 23-year-old aircraft’s tail section was falling apart as the aircraft went down. Alexander Neradko, head of a federal aviation oversight agency, said yesterday the aircraft was flying too low and he hoped flight data recorders would explain why.

21 March 2005. Specialists of the International Aviation Committee have completed analysis of the voice recorder of the An-24 aircraft (RA-46489) that crashed last Wednesday (March 16). “We have conducted the interpretation from the end to the beginning, and the talks of the crew during the last flight have been restored at present,” IAC’s technical director for flight safety Rudolf Teimurazov told Itar-Tass today. He said the “interpretation has not revealed anything that would indicate an emergency situation on board.” The crash in the Yamalo-Nenetsautonomous region left 28 people dead and 24 injured.

2 April 2005Crash, Nias, Indonesia

An Australian navy helicopter crashed off the quake-hit Indonesian island of Nias today, with Australian media saying nine people on board were killed. The Australian defence department said the Royal Australian Navy Sea King helicopter crashed near Gunungsitoli on the Indonesian island of Nias shortly after 1930 Australian eastern time. The spokesman said the helicopter, from HMAS Kanimbla, had 11 people on board including three crew but there was confusion about who else was on board. A reporter from Australian associated press on board Kanimbla reported that Kanimbla’s crew had been told that nine people, all Australians, on board the helicopter had died. In Jakarta, Indonesian air force spokesman Sagom Tambun said the helicopter had evacuated earthquake victims and was on its way back to Kanimbla. “But before it could reach the ship, it fell and burned. Residents saw three of its crew escape and they are now on the vessel, but we don’t know yet how many crew were in the helicopter,” the spokesman said. The AAP reporter said Kanimbla Commander George McGuire had told reporters on board that the helicopter was carrying an emergency medical team but had crashed as it approached to land near the village of Amandraya. McGuire said two people survived but were in a serious condition. He said those on board the helicopter included five Navy personnel, three from the Royal Australian Air Force and one from the Australian army. Kanimbla, an amphibious transport vessel sent to provide relief after Monday’s 8.7 on the Richter scale earthquake off Nias, had been part of a $770 million assistance package provided by Australia in the wake of the (December 26) earthquake and tsunami. Kanimbla had been stationed off Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra island and was on its way home after a month-long mission before it was ordered to return after Monday’s earthquake.

12 April 2005PK-LTZ

A De Havilland DHC-6 Twin Otter turboprop with 18 people aboard crashed today in West Papua province, officials said. The 19-seat aircraft crashed during a flight along the mountainous interior of Indonesia’s largest province, which shares New Guinea island with neighbouring Papua New Guinea, police said. “We lost contact with the plane carrying 14 adult passengers, a baby and three crew members, and now we are searching the location of the crash,” Timika Police Chief Lt. Col. Paulus Waterpau said. The Canadian-built plane operated by GT Air – a regional airline owned by the local administration – was on its way to the airstrip at the village of Enarotali in the central highlands, he said.