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Amtrak Train Crash in South Carolina Kills at Least 2 and Injures 116 Fatal Amtrak Crash in South Carolina Is New Challenge for Rail Service
(about 5 hours later)
PINE RIDGE, S.C. — An Amtrak train traveling from New York to Miami crashed into a freight train early Sunday, killing at least two people, injuring at least 116 others and spilling thousands of gallons of fuel, according to officials. CAYCE, S.C. — Amtrak suffered its third high-profile crash in less than seven weeks early Sunday when a passenger train traveling on the wrong track slammed into a stationary freight train in South Carolina, killing two people and intensifying worries about the safety and reliability of passenger rail service in the United States.
Amtrak said its train, which was carrying eight crew members and 139 passengers, hit a CSX train near Cayce, S.C., outside Columbia, around 2:35 a.m. Although the crash was the subject of a federal inquiry on Sunday, Amtrak’s chief executive, Richard H. Anderson, said that a signal system had been down and that dispatchers from another company, CSX, were routing trains at about the time of the wreck. The passenger train, heading south, was diverted onto a rail siding where, while apparently traveling below the speed limit, it crashed into a CSX train that had been loaded with automobiles.
The Amtrak train’s engineer, Michael Kempf, 54, of Savannah, Ga., and its conductor, Michael Cella, 36, of Orange Park, Fla., died in the crash, Margaret Fisher, the Lexington County Coroner, said at a news conference on Sunday afternoon. Both men were in the first car of the train. But with the specific sequence of events and cause of the crash unlikely to be settled for many months, the episode, which injured at least 116 people and allowed thousands of gallons of fuel to spill, posed a new challenge for an already beleaguered Amtrak.
“We should have had a lot more casualties, but we didn’t,” she said. By one crucial metric, Amtrak is stronger than ever: In its most recent fiscal year, it posted a record-high ridership of about 31.7 million passenger trips. Yet a series of fatal accidents in recent months have triggered a test of confidence in the rail service.
Drone footage of the crash broadcast by WLTX showed aerial views of the scene. “Amtrak has put a question in people’s minds,” said James E. Hall, a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the crash in South Carolina.
The CSX train was stationary, and appeared to be on the correct track, Gov. Henry McMaster said at a news conference on Sunday. “It appears that Amtrak was on the wrong track,” he said. CSX operates the track, according to its online system map. On Wednesday, a train carrying Republican members of Congress to a retreat in West Virginia hit a garbage truck in rural Virginia, killing a passenger in the truck. And in December, a passenger train on a newly opened Amtrak route jumped the tracks on an overpass near Seattle, slamming rail cars into a busy highway, killing at least three people and injuring about 100 others.
The first engine of the freight train was torn up, he said, and the engine of the Amtrak train, Train 91, was “barely recognizable.” Federal Railroad Administration statistics have shown that in recent years the agency has had an average of about two derailments a month, accounting for about one-quarter of the accidents it reports.
Derailments rarely cause more than minor injuries, but the aftermath was tragically different on Sunday not far from Columbia, the state capital.
Gov. Henry McMaster said the engine of the Amtrak train, which had been carrying eight crew members and 139 passengers on its route from New York to Miami, was “barely recognizable.”
“It’s a horrible thing to see — to understand the force that this involved,” Mr. McMaster said.“It’s a horrible thing to see — to understand the force that this involved,” Mr. McMaster said.
In a statement earlier Sunday morning, Amtrak said the lead engine and some of the passenger cars had derailed. The Lexington County coroner, Margaret Fisher, identified the dead as Amtrak employees: the train’s 54-year-old engineer, Michael Kempf, of Savannah, Ga., and a conductor, Michael Cella, 36, of Orange Park, Fla. Both men were in the first car of the train.
It was the second major crash involving an Amtrak train in less than a week. On Wednesday, a train carrying Republican members of Congress to a retreat in West Virginia hit a garbage truck in rural Virginia, killing a passenger in the truck. “We should have had a lot more casualties, but we didn’t,” she said.
One of the lawmakers on that train, Representative Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, visited survivors of Sunday’s crash at Pine Ridge Middle School, where the American Red Cross set up a shelter. Dozens of passengers were taken to a nearby middle school, where the American Red Cross set up a temporary shelter and passengers tried to make sense of what had happened aboard Train 91 at about 2:35 a.m. on Sunday.
“It’s surreal,” Mr. Wilson said in an interview. “I identify with the passengers that you want to continue right away.” “It just started shaking, you could actually feel the cars hitting the back of our train,” said Samuel Rodriguez, an unemployed metalworker from Brownsville, Brooklyn, who had been sitting beside his mother as they traveled to Florida. “Smoke. Screaming. I went to pick up one kid, checked my mother out to see if she was all right: ‘Ma, you all right? Don’t move.’”
The cause of the crash on Sunday was not immediately clear. The National Transportation Safety Board said on Twitter that it was beginning an investigation into the crash.
While it was too early to speculate as to what might have happened, “it appears that one or the other of the trains failed to obey a signal,” Steven Ditmeyer, an industry consultant and former federal railroad official, said in a phone interview on Sunday.
The train, operating Amtrak’s Silver Star service, originated at Pennsylvania Station in New York and was bound for Miami. The Lexington Sheriff’s Department said on Twitter that the crash occurred near Charleston Highway and Pine Ridge Road, close to Pine Ridge, S.C.
Samuel Rodriguez, 34, an unemployed metalworker from Brownsville, Brooklyn, was sitting beside his mother, Yolanda, 57, near the rear of the third or fourth car on his way to Port Richey, Fla.
“It just started shaking, you could actually feel the cars hitting the back of our train,” he said. “Smoke. Screaming. I went to pick up one kid, checked my mother out to see if she was all right: ‘Ma, you all right? Don’t move.’”
Mr. Rodriguez continued: “That’s when I went between aisles, and I saw a kid bleeding all over, his skull was showing, and his mother was in shock. So I run to the back, try to get to the bathroom. Bathroom’s tore up, toilet bowl’s out, everything’s a disaster, and I’m like, ‘Wow, I’m still walking.’”Mr. Rodriguez continued: “That’s when I went between aisles, and I saw a kid bleeding all over, his skull was showing, and his mother was in shock. So I run to the back, try to get to the bathroom. Bathroom’s tore up, toilet bowl’s out, everything’s a disaster, and I’m like, ‘Wow, I’m still walking.’”
He said his mother suffered a fractured nose and injured her leg in the crash, and was released from Lexington Medical Center in Columbia.He said his mother suffered a fractured nose and injured her leg in the crash, and was released from Lexington Medical Center in Columbia.
Officials said that 116 of the Amtrak passengers had been transferred to local hospitals. The CSX train did not have any passengers on board, Mr. McMaster said. Officials said that about 115 other Amtrak passengers had been transferred to local hospitals. The CSX train did not have any passengers on board, Mr. McMaster said.
Three Palmetto Health hospitals in Columbia received patients from the crash, including 59 adults and three children, Dr. Eric A. Brown, the physician executive at Palmetto Health Richland, said at a news conference on Sunday afternoon. Most of the injuries were minor. In a post on Twitter, President Trump expressed his condolences to victims of the crash and thanked emergency workers. Representative Joe Wilson, a Republican who represents this area, visited the Red Cross shelter and said he remained confident in Amtrak. But days after being aboard the train that derailed in Virginia, Mr. Wilson suggested that his experience on Sunday of seeing first responders and shaken passengers had been deeply unusual.
In order to accommodate all of the patients, officials triaged patients in a tent that they had set up several days ago in preparation for the “flu surge,” he said. “It’s surreal,” Mr. Wilson said. “I identify with the passengers that you want to continue right away.”
“Remarkably, I think most of them were quite calm,” Dr. Brown said. Federal officials said it was far too early to conclude with certainty what had happened and, more crucially, how.
Six patients were admitted to the Palmetto hospitals: One is critically injured and two are seriously injured, Dr. Brown said. At a news conference near the crash site, Robert L. Sumwalt, the current N.T.S.B. chairman, ruled out foul play and said investigators initially believed that a switch had been manually thrown and then padlocked.
Mr. Cahill said a hazardous materials team had been called to the site because roughly 5,000 gallons of fuel had spilled as a result of the crash. “The key to this investigation is learning why that switch was lined that way because the expectation was, of course, that the Amtrak train would be operating like this,” he said, pointing to a whiteboard showing the passenger train’s southbound direction.
“We were able to secure two leaks of fuel from the trains,” he said, adding there was “no threat to the public at this time.” Amtrak has described itself as a “safe and reliable transporter,” but Mark V. Rosenker, a former chairman of the N.T.S.B., said that although Sunday’s accident was another in a “series of anomalies,” it perhaps hinted at a “lack of safety culture” at Amtrak.
“This is not our first train derailment,” said Derrec Becker of the South Carolina Emergency Management Division, citing a fatal derailment in January 2005. A 42-car freight train operated by Norfolk Southern crashed into a smaller train near Granitteville, S.C., killing eight people, injuring more than 200 and leaking chlorine gas. “Accidents are never one thing,” Mr. Rosenker said. “They’re a chain of events which come together which create a catastrophic result.”
“It’s unfortunate that we have two fatalities,” he said of the crash on Sunday. “Our hearts are with those families right now.” He suspected that Sunday’s crash involved some discrepancy in the way CSX communicates with Amtrak, which does not own large swaths of the track it uses, and Mr. Hall suggested that the design of the nation’s rail network invited collisions between passenger and freight trains.
On Twitter, President Trump expressed his condolences for the victims of the crash, as did Senator Tim E. Scott, Republican of South Carolina. “Every day that Amtrak is going over these tracks with freight trains, which they do on a daily basis in our country, the potential for an event like this is real,” he said.
Amtrak has had a number of high-profile crashes and derailments over the years, leading to criticism from consumer advocates and government officials. Federal Railroad Administration statistics have shown that in recent years the agency has had an average of about two derailments a month, accounting for about one-quarter of all the accidents it reports. CSX said it was working with federal investigators, but Amtrak seemed to move swiftly to direct blame toward the company.
Most derailments, however, have rarely caused more than minor injuries. “CSX owns and controls the Columbia Subdivision where the accident occurred,” Amtrak said in a statement. “CSX maintains all of the tracks and signal systems. CSX controls the dispatching of all trains, including directing the signal systems which control the access to sidings and yards.”
Amtrak maintains that it has been a “safe and reliable transporter of more than 30 million passengers” and that it has a strong safety record. However, after a 2016 episode in Pennsylvania in which a train hit a piece of track equipment and derailed, killing two, it said in a statement, “We need to assess how we can get better.” By the end of a rainy and cold Sunday here, though, it was clear that the crash would be another stain on Amtrak’s reputation. The company has been under particular scrutiny since 2015, when one of its trains derailed in Philadelphia, killing eight people and injuring more than 200. A Pennsylvania judge dismissed involuntary manslaughter charges against the Amtrak engineer, saying it appeared to be an accident and not the result of criminal negligence.
Speaking at the temporary shelter on Sunday, Representative Wilson declined to say whether he wanted Congress to convene a hearing about Amtrak’s recent spate of crashes, but he said he had confidence in the rail service.
“With the level of commerce every day, whether it be by passenger or by freight, fortunately, the accidents are rare, but each one should be looked at to be avoided in the future,” he said.
Amtrak has installed technology known as positive train control on parts of its rail network in the Northeast Corridor after passenger trains traveling well above the speed limit derailed, leaving a trail of death and injuries.Amtrak has installed technology known as positive train control on parts of its rail network in the Northeast Corridor after passenger trains traveling well above the speed limit derailed, leaving a trail of death and injuries.
Positive train control would have prevented this kind of crash from occurring, Mr. Ditmeyer said. “But CSX is not required by law to have the system operational before the end of 2018. That’s the deadline set by Congress, but none of the railroads seem to be rushing to get it installed and operational before that deadline.” Rail experts said they believed that the technology would have prevented Sunday’s crash but noted that CSX was not required to have it operating before the end of 2018. Near the site of the wreckage, Mr. Sumwalt offered a heated assessment: “How many years have we been calling for P.T.C.? P.T.C. is designed to mitigate mistakes like this. This is, indeed, a human mistake.”
Representatives for CSX did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The federal investigation into Sunday’s crash is likely to be a protracted one, and officials should be aided by cameras aboard the Amtrak train: one depicting the engineer’s view, and another that should show what the engineer was doing at the time of the crash. The N.T.S.B., which said its investigators would work on the scene in South Carolina for five to seven days, said that the outward-facing video had been recovered and would be analyzed in Washington.
In the Amtrak crash in Virginia on Wednesday, two passengers from the truck were injured — one seriously — and hospitalized. Two members of the train’s crew and at least two passengers, including Representative Jason Lewis, Republican of Minnesota, were also hospitalized with minor injuries. But on Sunday, after yet another crash, researchers, experts and Amtrak officials alike independently had begun a new round of lamentations about what they said was an irregular focus on rail safety in America.
Republicans had chartered the train to carry them from Washington to the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, where the party was holding its annual policy retreat. Several lawmakers who were on the train estimated that more than half of the Republican members of the House and Senate, including Speaker Paul D. Ryan, were on board, and that many were accompanied by their spouses. Mr. Anderson, the former Delta Air Lines executive who recently became Amtrak’s leader, said the company faced an enormous backlog of “stay-in-good-repair investment,” but that upgrades required pulling up tracks and widespread inconveniences, like reduced schedules. Still, he said, that is exactly what was needed.
In December, a passenger train on a newly opened Amtrak route jumped the tracks on an overpass south of Tacoma, Wash., slamming rail cars into a busy highway, killing at least three people and injuring about 100 others. “We’ve got to bring the same sort of focus and safety cultures that you have in the airlines to the railroad industry in America,” he said.
In 2015, an Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia, killing eight people and injuring more than 200. A Pennsylvania judge dismissed involuntary manslaughter charges against the Amtrak engineer, saying it appeared to be an accident and not the result of criminal negligence.