The death toll from California’s tragic train collision stood at 25 early yesterday after friends and colleagues of a school teacher, who was on board an ill-fated commuter train, confirmed his death in hospital.
Paul Long, an English teacher at Oaks Christian School who had been riding the Metrolink train with his wife and son, was taken off life support at County-USC Medical Center on Saturday, his friends told the Los Angeles Times.
“It is going to be a great loss for the school,” headmaster Jeff Woodcock was quoted by the paper as saying.
PHOTO: AFP
Meanwhile, transportation officials said an engineer’s mistake caused Friday’s head-on collision between a passenger train and a freight train near Los Angeles.
The crash happened when a Metrolink passenger train with 222 people aboard apparently failed to stop at a signal near Chatsworth, 50km northwest of Los Angeles and smashed into a freight train.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger described the wreck as “one of the worst train accidents in modern history in California” and officials said that more people were still trapped beneath the twisted metal of a double-decker train car.
“We are deeply sorry and we are totally at a loss,” Metrolink spokeswoman Denise Tyrell said.
“At this moment we must acknowledge that it was a Metrolink engineer that made the error that caused yesterday’s accident,” she said.
A Los Angeles sheriff’s spokesman told CNN that the rescue operation officially ended late on Saturday, with the focus now on the recovery effort.
“They worked thoroughly and meticulously to check every single person and every single corner they could possibly find. It was long and it was focused. Now, it has ended and [the scene is] officially being turned over to the National Transportation Safety Board,” Steve Whitmore said.
The federal officials take control of the investigation once rescue efforts conclude.
At least 135 people were injured in the crash between the Ventura County Line passenger train 111 and a Union Pacific freight train on Friday.
Several dozen survivors remained in critical condition and more deaths were anticipated.
Each train was believed to be traveling at the time of the head-on collision at about 60kph.
The impact saw the first passenger car collapse into its locomotive.
At least seven cars from the freight train derailed, although most remained standing in accordion fashion across the tracks.
The interior of the train was “bloody, a mess. Just a disaster. It was horrible,” passenger Austin Walbridge told a local TV news reporter.
The Metrolink train’s usual routine is reportedly to wait until the Union Pacific freight train clears the track.
“There are more bodies in the wreckage, but at this point there is no way to tell how many,” Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told reporters.
Captain Ed Winters of the coroner’s office said more bodies could be seen in the wreckage of a double-decker passenger car.
“We have several [bodies] that are visible [in the lower car] at this time, but I don’t want to cause some hurt for families that don’t know and are still waiting,” for notification, Winters said.
The extent of the devastation and the high number of critically injured passengers taxed the area’s emergency response capabilities, Los Angeles City fire captain Steve Ruda said.
“We treated 135 patients yesterday, about 40 of those were critical patients, which is a very high number,” Ruda said earlier.
Critical patients were flown to area trauma centers.
“We utilized every trauma center in the county,” he said.
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