CRUSH-HOUR TRAIN
103 1 injured in LIRR Atlantic A Term. crash
A Long Island and Rail Road train running late from Far Rockaway barreled into an end-of-the-track bumper block at Brooklyn’s Atlantic Terminal and careened off the rails during rush hour Wednesday morning, injuring 103 people.
“We’re actually fortunate we didn’t have more severe injuries,” said FDNY Deputy Assistant Chief Dan Donoghue. “It could have been quite a bit worse.”
The train was pulling in at around 8:20 a.m. — with passengers already standing in the aisles — when it inexplicably failed to stop, officials said.
After the impact, the wheels on the first car “lifted up” off Track 6 and the train crashed through “a small room,” Donoghue said.
“It hit that wall pretty hard,” he said, noting a piece of one of the rails sliced through the floor of a train car, nearly hitting passengers.
The train was running about nine minutes late when it crashed, sending smoke throughout the station.
“I smashed my whole face into the seat in front of me,” said Joey Daliapes, 21, who was in a middle car. “There were a lot of people bleeding, ladies crying their eyes out on the floor. We didn’t know if we were going to die.”
Wendy Gerzog, 57, from Lawrence, LI, was in the first car.
“All of a sudden, it was just like boom. I was at the bottom of the pile. Everyone was screaming. It was scary,” she said.
The injuries were relatively minor — with the worst being a possible broken leg, officials said. The train’s engineer was among those hurt.
While it’s uncertain how fast the train was traveling at the moment of impact, officials said it should have been going at about 10 to 15 mph as it entered the station, and that human error was likely a factor.
“Once you’re at that point and you’re at that speed, it’s primarily the locomotive engineer’s responsibility to control the train,” said MTA Chairman Tom Prendergast.
But Donoghue said the engineer may, in fact, have tried to stop and the brakes failed.
“All these things have to be looked at in the investigation,” he said.
The train operator, who was not identified, was interviewed after the crash. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating.
While many New York officials, including Gov. Cuomo, were at the scene, Mayor de Blasio was absent.
Hizzoner, instead, chose to rub shoulders at an unrelated NYPD press event on 2016 crime stats less than a mile away at The Brooklyn Museum.
“Looks like this situation will be fixable pretty soon, so I think it’s a magnitude question here,” de Blasio said.
Although the cause of the crash was not immediately clear, officials said it could have been avoided if the LIRR train had Positive Train Control — an automatic braking technology that can override operators to stop or slow down trains that are traveling too fast.