NTSB launches NYC derailment probe
Print Edition
UNITED States federal authorities were beginning an exhaustive investigation yesterday into what caused a New York City commuter train to derail, killing four people and injuring more than 60 others.
The National Transportation Safety Board said its investigators could spend up to 10 days probing all aspects of the accident that toppled seven cars and the locomotive, leaving the lead car only centimeters from the water at a bend in the New York City borough of the Bronx, where the Hudson and Harlem rivers meet.
The NTSB said it would consider whether excessive speed, mechanical problems or human error could have played a role in the Sunday morning crash, which threw some riders from toppling cars.
It was the latest accident in a troubled year for the second-biggest US commuter railroad, which had never experienced a passenger death in an accident in its 31-year history.
Officials warned the 26,000 weekday riders of Metro-North railroad to brace for crowded trains in the morning.
The locomotive was hoisted back on the track before dawn yesterday, and two cranes were in place to lift the rest of the toppled cars pending approval of the board, spokesman Aaron Donovan said.
About 150 people were on board when the train derailed as it rounded a riverside curb. Donovan believed everyone on board had been accounted for.
Some of the passengers on the Metro-North train from the town of Poughkeepsie to Manhattan were jolted from sleep around 7:20am to screams and the frightening sensation of their compartment rolling over on the bend.
When the motion stopped, all seven cars and the locomotive had lurched off the rails.
In their efforts to find passengers, rescuers shattered windows, searched nearby woods and waters and used pneumatic jacks and air bags to peer under wreckage.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said the track did not appear to be faulty, leaving speed as a possible culprit for the crash. The speed limit on the curve is 48 kilometers per hour, compared with 113 kph in the area approaching it, officials said.
Sunday’s accident came six months after an eastbound train derailed in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and was struck by a westbound train. The crash injured 73 passengers, two engineers and a conductor.
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