Amtrak train derails; 6 dead
PHILADELPHIA — Daylight today revealed the destruction and devastation caused by an Amtrak train derailment in Philadelphia that left at least six people dead and injured dozens more, several critically, as survivors recalled a terrifying wreck that plunged them into darkness and chaos.
Some passengers had to scramble through the windows of toppled cars to escape. One of the seven cars was completely mangled.
The accident closed the nation’s busiest rail corridor between New York and Washington as federal investigators begin sifting through the twisted remains to determine what went wrong.
Train 188, a Northeast Regional, left Washington, D.C., and was headed to New York when it derailed shortly after 9 p.m. Tuesday. Amtrak said the train was carrying 238 passengers and five crew members.
“It is an absolute disastrous mess,” Mayor Michael Nutter said.
Nutter said not all the people on the train had been accounted for. Temple University Hospital’s Dr. Herbert Cushing said today a person died there overnight from a chest injury. More than 140 people went to hospitals to be evaluated or treated for injuries that included burns and fractures.
Amtrak said the cause of the derailment was not known and that it was investigating. The National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Railroad Administration were also dispatching investigators to the site.
Passenger Jillian Jorgensen, 27, was seated in the quiet car — the second passenger car — and said the train was going “fast enough for me to be worried” when it began a hard bank to the right. The train derailed, the lights went out and Jorgensen was thrown from her seat. She said she “flew across the train” and landed underneath some seats that she assumed had come loose from the floor.
Jorgensen, a reporter for The New York Observer who lives in Jersey City, N. J., said she managed to wriggle free as fellow passengers screamed. She saw one man lying still, his face covered in blood, and a woman with a broken leg. Eventually, she climbed out an emergency exit window and a firefighter helped her down a ladder to safety.
“It was terrifying and awful, and as it was happening it just did not feel like the kind of thing you could walk away from, so I feel very lucky,” Jorgensen said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. “The scene in the car I was in was total disarray and people were clearly in a great deal of pain.”
Early this morning, authorities on the scene seemed to be girding for a long haul. One sign: several portable toilets were delivered for investigators and recovery workers.
All seven train cars, including the engine, were in “various stages of disarray,” Nutter said. He said there were cars that were “completely overturned, on their side, ripped apart.”
The front of the train was going into a turn when it started to shake before coming to a sudden stop.
An Associated Press manager, Paul Cheung, was on the train and said he was watching a video on his laptop when “the train started to decelerate, like someone had slammed the brake.”
“Then suddenly you could see everything starting to shake,” he said. “You could see people’s stuff flying over me.”
