Sunday, February 4, 2018

Early Sunday morning, Amtrak’s passenger train number 91, the Silver Star, bound for Miami from New York, slammed into a stationary CSX freight train in Cayce, about ten miles south of Columbia, capital of the US state of South Carolina. The engineer, 54-year-old Michael Kempf of Savannah, Georgia, and conductor, 36-year-old Michael Cella of Orange Park, Fla, were killed and at least 116 people were injured, some seriously. Robert Sumwalt, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, told a press conference that the passenger train had been diverted into a siding by a switch left “literally locked, with a padlock” in that position.

The accident happened at about 2:35 am local time at a switching yard in the small city of Cayce. The Amtrak train, with 139 passengers and eight employees aboard, collided head on with the freight train, which was parked with no one on board. The Amtrak locomotive and the leading locomotive on the freight train were destroyed; the Amtrak locomotive and some of its passenger cars derailed, and one of those cars was folded in half. Several freight cars were crumpled and looked “like crushed tin foil”, according to a reporter for Reuters. In a press conference, the state governor, Henry McMaster, said the Amtrak locomotive was “barely recognizable” and described it as “a horrible thing to see, to understand the force involved”.

Harrison Cahill, a spokesman for Lexington County, gave a count of 116 injured, up from an initial report of 70; according to Derrec Becker, public information officer for the South Carolina Emergency Management Division, injuries ranged “from cuts and bruises to severe broken bones”. Dr. Steve Shelton, director of emergency preparedness at Palmetto Health, said that three patients were in serious or critical condition at the primary local trauma center. Two were said to be still critical overnight. Local media reported a spill of approximately 5,000 gallons of fuel from the freight train, but state officials said this posed no danger.

Passenger Derek Pettaway told the CBS network that like most others, he had been sleeping when the accident happened; the rear carriage where he was shook violently and then came to a hard stop. “You knew we’d hit something or we’d derailed”, he said. According to him, Amtrak staff cleared the passengers from the train rapidly, and there was no panic; “I think people were more in shock than anything else”, he said.

“Key to this investigation is learning why the switch was lined that way”, Sumwalt said. Amtrak’s CEO, Richard Anderson, speaking to reporters on Sunday, held CSX responsible; he stated that the track in that area is owned by CSX and that the signals, which CSX operates, were not working at the time of the accident and a CSX dispatcher was therefore directing the Amtrak train’s movements. Sumwalt noted that an automatic monitoring and braking system called positive train control, which was not in use on the stretch of line, could have forestalled the collision.

This is the third fatal accident involving an Amtrak train in three months. On December 18, the inaugural train on a new route in Washington state derailed at high speed while crossing above a highway, killing three; on Wednesday, the driver of a garbage truck was killed in Virginia when he collided with a chartered Amtrak train carrying Republican lawmakers to a retreat.

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