At least 4 dead, 63 injured in NYC train derailment

New York train derailment kills four, injures 63 Sun, Dec 01 21:15 PM EST 1 of 18 By Noreen O'Donnell NEW YORK (Reuters) - A suburban New York train derailed on Sunday, killing four people and injuring 63, including 11 critically, when all seven cars of a Metro-North train ran off the tracks on a sharp curve, officials said. The crash happened at 7:20 a.m. (1220 GMT) about 100 yards (meters) north of Metro-North's Spuyten Duyvil station in the city's Bronx borough, said Metro-North spokesman Aaron Donovan. Metropolitan Transit Authority police said two men and two women were killed and the MTA said 63 people were injured. A Fire Department spokesman said 11 people had been sent to the hospital in critical condition and six in serious condition with non-life threatening injuries. The train, headed south toward Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal, was about half full at the time of the crash with about 150 passengers and was not scheduled to stop at the Spuyten Duyvil station, said the MTA, the parent company of Metro-North. "On a work day, fully occupied, it would have been a tremendous disaster," New York City Fire Commissioner Salvatore Joseph Cassano told reporters at the scene. The derailment happened in a wooded area where the Hudson and Harlem rivers meet. At least one rail car was lying toppled near the water and others were lying on their sides. There was no official word on possible causes of the accident. "That is a dangerous area on the track just by design," Governor Andrew Cuomo told CNN after touring the site. "The trains are going about 70 miles per hour coming down the straight part of the track. They slow to about 30 miles per hour to make that sharp curve ... where the Hudson River meets the Harlem River and that is a difficult area of the track." Cuomo said it appeared that all passengers had been accounted for. He said recovery of the train's "black box" - a data-recording device similar to those on airplanes - would reveal more about the train's speed, possible mechanical issues and whether brakes were applied. The National Transportation Safety Board said it would be on the scene investigating the accident for at least the next week and would focus on track conditions, signaling systems, mechanical equipment and the performance of the train crew. Passenger Frank Tatulli told television station WABC he had been riding in the first car and the train had been traveling "a lot faster" than usual. "The guy was going real fast on the turns and I just didn't know why because we were making good time. And all of a sudden we derailed on the turn," he said. Joseph Bruno, who heads the city's Office of Emergency Management, told CNN it appeared that three of the four people killed had been ejected from the train. The MTA and the fire department both said that could not immediately be confirmed. Michael Keaveney, 22, a security worker whose home overlooks the site, said he had heard a loud bang when the train derailed. "It woke me up from my sleep," he said. "It looked like (the train) took out a lot of trees on its way over toward the water." SERIES OF ACCIDENTS New York police divers were seen in the water near the accident, and dozens of firefighters were helping pull people from the wreckage. None of the passengers were in the water, said Marjorie Anders of Metro-North. The derailment was the latest in a string of problems this year for Metro-North, the second busiest U.S. commuter railroad in terms of monthly ridership. The MTA said details about how the accident would impact Monday morning's commute were not yet available. In July, 10 cars of a CSX freight train carrying trash derailed in the same area, Anders said. Partial service was restored four days later but full service did not return for more than a week. In May, a Metro-North passenger train struck a commuter train between Fairfield and Bridgeport, Connecticut, injuring more than 70 people and halting service on the line. The MTA said Sunday's accident marked the first customer fatality in Metro-North's three-decade history and that it was a "black day" for the railroad. Amtrak said its Empire Line service between New York City and Albany was being restored after being halted immediately after the crash. Amtrak's Northeast Corridor service between Boston and Washington was not affected. Metro-North's Hudson Line service has been suspended between Tarrytown and Grand Central station, and bus service is being provided between White Plains and Tarrytown, the MTA said. New York-Presbyterian Hospital said it received 18 patients from the accident, and two remained in critical condition. Jacobi Medical Center, which received 13 patients from the accident, said none have critical injuries and several had been discharged. President Barack Obama was briefed on the accident and a White House official said the president's thoughts and prayers were with the friends and families of those involved. (Additional reporting by Myles Miller, Matt Robinson, Ed Krudy and Carey Gillam.; Writing by Edith Honan.; Editing by Frances Kerry, Bill Trott and Christopher Wilson) ============ Published time: December 01, 2013 13:20 Edited time: December 01, 2013 15:38 Get short URL Emergency workers at the scene of a commuter train wreck on Dec 1, 2013 in the Bronx borough of New York. (AFP Photo / Timothy A. Clary) Share on tumblr Tags Accident, Transport, USA A Metro-North passenger train has derailed in the Bronx area of New York City, with reports of at least 4 deaths and 63 injured, 11 of them critically, according to the FDNY, Reuters reports. Rebecca Schwartz, a witness at the scene, told the AP news agency that some of the carriages were submerged in water and that numerous emergency vehicles were at the scene. However, photos taken by witnesses show the cars just derailed without slipping into the water. Local media say up to 135 firefighters are at the scene. Police later said that the carriages were not submerged in water. There is no information yet on how many people were traveling on the train. Emergency workers at the scene of a commuter train wreck on Dec 1, 2013 in the Bronx borough of New York. (AFP Photo / Timothy A. Clary) Emergency workers at the scene of a commuter train wreck on Dec 1, 2013 in the Bronx borough of New York. (AFP Photo / Timothy A. Clary) The derailment happened just north of Manhattan, near Spuyten Duyvil station, shortly after 7am on Sunday. According to ABC, the train was the 5:54 from Poughkeepsie to Grand Central and was due to arrive into Grand Central at 07:43. Five cars of the train's seven carriages came off the track about 100 feet north of the station just after 7am, MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan told WCBS 880 radio. Donovan who was working near the scene of the crash said the noise was so great he thought a plane was coming in. “I was at my desk at my computer, and I thought a plane was coming in. I jumped away. Then after the noise stopped, I looked out the window and saw the derailment, and I called 911 right away,” he said. Emergency crews at the scene of a commuter train wreck on Dec 1, 2013 in the Bronx borough of New York. (AFP Photo / Timothy A. Clary) Emergency crews at the scene of a commuter train wreck on Dec 1, 2013 in the Bronx borough of New York. (AFP Photo / Timothy A. Clary) Frank Tatulli, a passenger who managed to get out of the wreck on his own despite suffering head and neck injuries, told WABC radio that he thought the train was traveling faster than usual. The line involved in the accident is Metro-North’s Hudson line, which serves dormer towns like Croton-Harmon, Peekskill, Ossining and Yonkers. Metro North said in a tweet that the service on the line is currently suspended. At a court hearing in November, following an earlier derailment on the New Haven Branch of the Metro-North railroad on May 17, a railroad official said that maintenance on the network was way behind schedule. At the National Transportation Safety Board hearing in Washington DC, chief engineer, Robert Puciloski, said the railway was “behind in several areas”, including a five year schedule of cyclical maintenance and that there was no system in place to replace retiring workers. On May 17, an eastbound train struck a westbound train at Bridgeport injuring 73 passengers, two engineers and a conductor. And on May 28 a track foreman was struck and killed by train in West Haven. He had earlier requested that the section of the track he was working on be taken out of service. =========================== Driver in fatal New York train crash 'zoned out': union Wed, Dec 04 01:37 AM EST 1 of 8 By Chris Francescani , Mark Hosenball and Curtis Skinner (Reuters) - The driver of a New York commuter train that derailed on Sunday, killing four people, told federal investigators he "zoned out" shortly before the crash, the driver's labor union leader said. The seven-car train was traveling at 82 miles per hour (132 km per hour), nearly three times the speed limit for the curved section of track where it crashed, investigators have said. The driver, William Rockefeller, 46, applied the brakes five seconds before it derailed. The crash also critically injured 11 people and snarled travel for the roughly 26,000 regular commuters on the Metro-North Hudson line that serves suburbs north of New York City. On Tuesday, Rockefeller told National Transportation Safety Board investigators that "he nodded. He zoned out," Anthony Bottalico, the general chairman of the driver's labor union, the Association of Commuter Rail Employees, told Reuters. Rockefeller told investigators that "by the time he realized (what was happening) it was almost into the curve," Bottalico said. "He put the train into neutral and put the brakes on immediately. That's what he acknowledged he did." The NTSB has cautioned that its investigation would continue for weeks, if not months, and it was far from reaching a conclusion on the cause. Alcohol tests on Rockefeller came back negative, NTSB member Earl Weener told a news conference on Tuesday, adding the results of drug tests were still pending. The train might have benefited from a Positive Train Control (PTC) system to stop or slow a speeding train, Weener said. "For more than 20 years, the NTSB has recommended implementation" of PTC, Weener said. "Since this is a derailment, it's possible that PTC could have prevented it." Railroad experts have been advocating for PTC systems for years, but they are expensive and complicated and often incompatible for all trains within a single transit system. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs Metro-North, said it began work to install Positive Train Control in 2009 with a goal of implementing it by 2015. The authority said it has budgeted nearly $600 million, with at least another $300 million needed, and even then was unlikely to meet the 2015 deadline. "I WAS IN A DAZE" Apart from the equipment and technology, investigators are looking at Rockefeller, a volunteer firefighter who was married two years ago. The NTSB, which interviewed Rockefeller on Tuesday afternoon, said it is focusing on all his activities in the 72 hours before the crash, Weener said. Rockefeller spent about two hours with NTSB investigators, said Bottalico of the driver's labor union. The NTSB said in a statement late on Tuesday evening, after Bottalico's news interviews, that it had removed the Association of Commuter Rail Employees from the investigation, citing a breach of confidential information. Rockefeller had never been disciplined for job performance in his 10 years as a train driver, his union said. Rockefeller has retained a defense lawyer, Jeffrey Chartier, who did not respond to a request for comment. One source involved in the ongoing investigation quoted Rockefeller directly as having told investigators, "I was in a daze" in the moments before the crash. Asked whether Rockefeller dozed off, the source said, "It's more like a highway hypnosis. You're looking straight ahead and you're seeing rail and rail and rail, and you lose perspective." A similar condition of temporary lapse of consciousness, known as microsleep, was blamed for a 2008 Boston light rail crash that killed the operator. In 2003, assistant captain Richard Smith blacked out at the wheel of the Staten Island ferry and crashed on docking, killing 11 people. Smith pleaded guilty to negligent homicide and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. Rockefeller could not fully recall what happened, except that at some point he suddenly came out of the temporary daze, realized the train was going too fast and into a dangerous curve, and applied the brakes, said the law-enforcement source, who has access to official reports on the investigation and requested anonymity. "Look, it doesn't make what happened any better or anything, but this is comparable to driving a car and looking at the white lines, and sort of nodding off for a minute," Bottalico said. If criminal charges are warranted, they would be brought by Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson, a spokesman for Johnson said. "We think when final record is looked at, they'll realize there was no criminal intent here," Bottalico said. "Speed was high, but it was an accident." (Reporting by Chris Francescani in New York, Mark Hosenball in Washington and Curtis Skinner in Yonkers, New York; Writing by Daniel Trotta and Eric M. Johnson; Editing by Gunna Dickson and Lisa Shumaker) ============================