Oxnard, California: A commuter train bound for Los Angeles derailed before dawn on Tuesday in a fiery collision with an abandoned commercial pickup after the truck’s driver took a wrong turn and got stuck on the tracks.
There was a loud boom and the screech of brakes before three of the train’s five cars toppled over, sending 30 people to hospitals. Four were in critical condition, including the engineer.
“It seemed like an eternity while we were flying around the train. Everything was flying,” said passenger Joel Bingham. “A brush of death definitely came over me.”
The train pushed the truck some 90 meters down the tracks, said Robert Sumwalt of the National Transportation Safety Board.
Lives were likely saved by passenger cars designed to absorb a crash. They were purchased after a deadly collision a decade ago, Metrolink officials said. The four passenger cars remained largely intact, as did the locomotive.
Police found the disoriented driver of the demolished Ford F-450 pickup 2.6 kilometres from the crossing 45 minutes after the crash, said Jason Benites, an assistant chief of the Oxnard Police Department.
That driver, Jose Alejandro Sanchez-Ramirez, 54, of Yuma, Arizona, was briefly hospitalised then arrested on Tuesday afternoon on suspicion of felony hit-and-run, Benites said.
Sanchez-Ramirez, who delivers produce, was driving a pickup with an empty bed pulling a trailer with some welding equipment in it. He told police he tried to turn right at an intersection but turned prematurely and his truck got stuck straddling the rails.
Police said they tested Sanchez-Ramirez for drugs and alcohol, but they would not discuss the results.
There have been six accidents at the crossing where the crash occurred in the past seven years, including one, in which a driver accidentally turned onto the tracks in 2010 and was struck by a Metrolink train and injured, according to federal railroad accident reports. Two people were killed at the crossing last year when a car struck an Amtrak train.
The train had just left its second stop of Oxnard on its way to downtown Los Angeles, about 105 kilometres away, when it struck the truck around 5.45am. There were 48 passengers aboard and three crew members who were all injured.
The engineer saw the abandoned vehicle and hit the brakes but there wasn’t enough time to stop, Oxnard Fire Battalion Chief Sergio Martinez said.
Bingham said the lights went out when the train fell over. He was banged up from head to toe but managed to find an escape for himself and others, many of whom had been asleep when the crash happened.
Twenty-eight people were taken to hospitals by ambulance and two more went to the hospital on their own, but only eight had been admitted by day’s end.
Patients had spinal injuries and broken bones, officials said.
After such a crash killed 11 people and injured 180 others in Glendale in 2005, Metrolink invested heavily to buy passenger cars with collapsible bumpers and other features to absorb impact.
The NTSB, the federal agency taking over the investigation of the crash, had team members arriving throughout the day.
Sanchez-Ramirez told police he turned onto the tracks before the crossing arm came down. It wasn’t clear how long his truck was stuck before the train hit it.
His wife, Lucila Sanchez, said he jumped out when he saw the train coming and couldn’t restart his engine.
“It’s not his fault,” she told the Los Angeles Times.
The accident happened on the same line as Metrolink’s worst disaster when 25 people were killed and more than 100 hurt on September 12, 2008. A commuter train engineer was texting and ran a red light, striking a Union Pacific freight train head-on in the San Fernando Valley community of Chatsworth.
