Questions abound after train derailment

A Washington state politician is questioning whether Amtrak had sufficient safety measures in place before Monday's catastrophic derailment.

"It's going to call into question the overall safety culture that Amtrak may be lacking," Washington House of Representatives member Dick Muri told China Daily.

An Amtrak 501 Cascade train, with 78 passengers and five crew members, derailed on an overpass early Monday on Interstate Highway 5 in Pierce County, Washington, with some of its 14 cars crumpling and plunging onto the highway.

Three people died in the crash and more than 70 were injured. As of Tuesday, 35 people were still hospitalized, including 21 in critical or serious condition.

Several people also were injured on the highway, though no fatalities were reported on the major roadway.

"The train cars will be removed (from the highway) by the end of the day," said Mike Courts, mayor of DuPont, the small town in which the train derailed. He said they were aiming to clear the highway before a snowfall.

"Whether it (Amtrak) makes sure that trains run on the right time, the right speed, at the right place … something that could be possibly controlled," said Muri, a Republican who represents the 28th District. "We have been questioning for the last couple of years, many years, about the whole idea of high-speed train coming to our land here. … This is way above our level. It is a federal issue when you talk about train safety."

Investigators also are looking into whether the train's engineer was distracted by the presence of an employee-in-training next to him in the locomotive, a federal official said Tuesday.

The official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, said investigators want to know whether the engineer lost "situational awareness" because of the second person in the cab.

Preliminary information also indicated that the emergency brake went off and was not manually activated by the engineer, National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) member Bella Dinh-Zarr said.

The train was making the inaugural run along a fast bypass route that was created by refurbishing freight tracks alongside I-5. The 15-mile, $180.7-million project was aimed at speeding up service by bypassing a route with a number of curves, single-track tunnels and freight traffic.

At a meeting on Dec 4 in Lakewood, Washington, southwest of Tacoma, Mayor Don Anderson said it was only a matter of time before the Amtrak train would be involved in a deadly accident.

"It's virtually inevitable that someone is going to get killed that wouldn't be killed otherwise," Anderson said then. "This is unacceptable."

The city of Lakewood sued the Washington state Department of Transportation in 2013, looking to stop the project, arguing it did not have a sufficient environmental review, The Seattle Times reported. The city lost partly because the law prevents cities and towns from regulating rail lines.

The train was clocked at 81.1 mph moments before the derailment, according to transitdocs.com, a website that maps Amtrak train locations and speeds using data from the railroad's train tracker app.

Dinh-Zarr confirmed on Monday that the data recorder in the train's showed it was train was traveling at about three times the speed limit (30 mph) when it derailed. She said it was too early to determine why the train was going so fast.

Amtrak's co-chief executive, Richard Anderson, acknowledged that a working Positive Train Control (PTC) system, which slows trains if they are going too fast, had not been installed on that stretch.

Associated Press contributed to this story.

lindadeng@chinadailyusa.com