U.S. investigators seeking to interview crew members in fatal derailment
By Tom James
DUPONT, Wash. (Reuters) - Safety investigators hope the engineer of an Amtrak passenger train that careened off a bridge onto a highway in Washington state can explain why his locomotive was traveling more than twice the speed limit when the deadly derailment occurred, officials said on Tuesday.
Three people aboard the train were killed in the Monday morning wreck near the town of DuPont, in which all 12 carriages and one of the train's two locomotives tumbled off the rails, officials said. Another 100 people were taken to hospitals, 10 with serious injuries.
Some motorists on Interstate 5 were among the injured, though nobody on the highway died.
The accident occurred as the train was making its inaugural run on a new, slightly quicker route between Seattle and Portland, Oregon, with 86 people aboard, 80 of them passengers, Amtrak said.
(Map of derailment site: http://tmsnrt.rs/2kKt2Uy)
Recorded data recovered from the rear locomotive showed the train was going 80 miles (129 km) per hour on a curved stretch of track where the speed limit was 30 mph (48 kph), National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) officials said on Monday night. The board said it was investigating whether other factors besides speed were involved.
The derailment placed Amtrak, the country's main passenger rail service, under renewed scrutiny following a series of fatal incidents.
The stretch of track where the derailment happened had previously been used by slow-moving freight trains but was recently upgraded to handle passenger trains as part of a $181 million project to cut travel time between Tacoma and Olympia.
Washington state's transportation department said the track underwent "weeks of inspection and testing" before the new route was inaugurated on Monday.
NTSB spokesman Peter Knudson told Reuters on Tuesday that safety board investigators intended to question the engineer and other members of the crew but said he was not aware of when those interviews would occur or whether any of them had already been conducted.
"We would reach out to the crew members and let them know our intentions to interview them," he said. "If they have injuries, or aren't ready, we'll wait." He added that crew members could not be compelled to give statements to NTSB investigators, though in most cases they do.
Meanwhile, workers lifted mangled train cars onto flatbed trucks from the wreckage, using two towering cranes in wet, windy weather as they sought to reopen the southbound lanes of Interstate 5, a major West Coast highway stretching from the Canadian border to Mexico. They expected to remove five of the cars and the locomotive by Tuesday afternoon and take them to a nearby U.S. military base for further examination by federal investigators, officials said.
The locomotive alone weighs more than 270,000 pounds (120 tonnes) and will require an extra-large truck to move, Dan Hall, the regional commander for the Washington State Patrol, said at a news conference.
"It's going to take quite a feat to get that out of there," Hall told reporters. "We're still working on the logistics on how exactly we're going to do that."
The southbound stretch of Interstate 5 will remain closed for several days, the Washington State Department of Transportation said.
At least two of the three people who died in the derailment were transit advocates who wanted to see the inaugural run of a new route for the train line, said Abe Zumwalt, director of policy research for the Rail Passengers Association.
Jim Hamre and Zack Willhoite were members of the association, the Washington, D.C.-based organization said in a statement identifying the two men as victims of the wreck. Willhoite worked for a local transportation agency, Pierce Transit, as a customer service support specialist.
"They were best friends and they took all kinds of trips together, and given that yesterday was an inaugural run on a service that both had advocated for tirelessly, it made sense that they were on board," Zumwalt said in a phone interview.
(Reporting by Tom James in DuPont, Washington, and Jonathan Allen in New York; Additional reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles; Writing by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Cynthia Osterman)
