Federal investigators are sifting through the wreckage of a train crash in New Jersey to determine what happened before it barreled through a station and crashed into a barrier, causing a young mother to be killed by falling debris and injuring more than 100.
Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) are looking to determine how fast the commuter train was going when it crashed at the busy Hoboken Station on Thursday morning.
Their investigation is seeking to answer many questions, including whether a system designed to prevent accidents by overriding the engineer and automatically slowing or stopping trains that are going too fast could have helped if it had been installed on the line.
Photo: Reuters
Investigators planned to pull one of the black-box recorders from the locomotive at the back of the train on Thursday evening. The device contains information on the train’s speed and braking, but it was not safe enough for investigators to extract the second recorder from the engineer’s compartment because of the collapsed roof and the possibility of asbestos in the old building, NTSB vice chairwoman Bella Dinh-Zarr said.
More than 100,000 people use New Jersey Transit to commute from New Jersey to New York City each day. The New Jersey Transit portion of Hoboken Station was to remain closed yesterday, slowing the morning commute for those making connections there.
As investigators began their probe, the family of Fabiola Bittar de Kroon, the crash’s sole fatality, was in mourning. De Kroon had recently moved to New Jersey from Brazil after her husband got a job with an international liquor company.
She had just dropped her daughter off at a daycare center before rushing to catch a train, daycare director Karlos Magner said.
“She was dropping off the daughter, I was closing up the stroller,” Magner said. “We had a good talk for like a minute and she said she was in a rush.”
Shortly after, the New Jersey Transit train ran off the end of the track as it was pulling in at about 8:45am, smashing through a concrete-and-steel bumper. As it ground to a halt in the waiting area, it knocked out pillars, collapsing a section of the roof.
De Kroon was killed by debris and 108 others were injured, mostly on the train, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said.
Scores were hospitalized, some with serious injuries, including broken bones.
The engineer, Thomas Gallagher, was pulled from the mangled first car, was treated and released from hospital. Officials said he was cooperating with investigators.
Gallagher has worked for New Jersey Transit for 29 years and a union roster showed that he started as an engineer about 18 years ago.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said investigators would determine whether the explanation was an incapacitated engineer, equipment failure or something else.
Some witnesses said they did not hear or feel the brakes being applied before the crash. Authorities would not estimate how fast the train was going, but the speed limit heading into the station is 10mph (16kph).
“The train came in at much too high rate of speed and the question is: ‘Why is that?’” Christie said.
Cuomo and Christie cautioned against jumping to conclusions about the role that the lack of positive train control played or did not play in the tragedy.
The NTSB has been pressing for some version of the technology for at least 40 years and the industry is under government orders to install it, but regulators have repeatedly extended the deadline at railroads’ requests. The target date is now the end of 2018.
Over the past 20 years, the NTSB has listed the lack of positive train control as a contributing factor in 25 crashes. Those include the Amtrak wreck last year in Philadelphia in which a speeding train ran off the rails along a curve. Eight people were killed.
Tom Spina, a maintenance supervisor for a private company was in the terminal after having worked the night.
“It was chaotic. There was yelling and screaming, a lot of people in shock,” Spina said. “Things like this we see in movies. You don’t think you’re going to see it in real life.”
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