Deadly Amtrak crash ‘was preventable’

CAYCE, South Carolina — US Federal investigators are trying to figure out why a switch was in the wrong position, sending an Amtrak train into a freight train and killing a conductor and an engineer in South Carolina.

But they already know what could have prevented the wreck that injured more than 100 passengers — a GPSbased system called “positive train control” that knows the location of all trains and the positions of all switches in an area to prevent the kind of human error that can put two trains on the same track.

“It could have avoided this accident. That’s what it’s designed to do,” said National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Robert Sumwalt, referring to technology that regulators have been demanding for decades with mixed success.

He said the passenger train hurtled down a side track near Cayce around 2:45 am on Sunday after a stop 16 kilometers north in Columbia because a switch was locked in place, diverting it from the main line. A crew on the freight train had moved the switch to drive it from one side track where it unloaded 34 train cars of automobiles to the side track where it was parked. The switch was padlocked as it was supposed to be, Sumwalt said.

The system that operates the train signals in the area was down, so CSX Corp, the freight railroad operator which runs that stretch of track, was manually operating the signals. Sumwalt said it was too early to know if the signal was red to warn the Amtrak crew that the switch was not set to continue along the main train line.

Just hours after Sunday’s crash, which also sent 116 of the 147 people on board the New York-to-Miami train to the hospital, Amtrak President Robert Anderson said there must be no more delays from the federal government in installing the safety system by the end of 2018.

He deferred to investigators about whether the system would have stopped this crash. “Theoretically, an operative PTC system would include switches in addition to signals, so it would cover both speed and switches,” Anderson said.

The Silver Star was going an estimated 94 km/h when it struck the freight train, Governor Henry McMaster said. It was the middle of the night, and many people were jolted from sleep by the crash and forced into the cold.

Engineer Michael Kempf, 54, of Savannah, Georgia, and conductor Michael Cella, 36, of Orange Park, Florida, were killed, Lexington County Coroner Margaret Fisher said.

Of the 116 people taken to four hospitals, only about a half dozen were admitted. The rest had minor injuries such as cuts, bruises or whiplash, authorities said.