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Emergency personnel wait
near an Amtrak train crash site in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on May 13, 2015
which killed at least five people injured dozens ©Jewel Samad (AFP)
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A passenger train derailed and overturned in Philadelphia,
killing at least five people and leaving a horrific scene of mangled metal and
broken glass.
Emergency personnel said
65 people were hurt, six of them critically, after the accident on the train
heading from Washington, D.C. to New York. Others walked away from the crash
with light injuries.
AFP reports:
The train's seven train
cars, including the engine car, were crushed, turned over on their side or
upside down in the late evening disaster.
One was unrecognizable as
a train car, as it lay on the ground in a ruined mass of metal.
As night fell, rescuers
with flashlights gingerly scoured through the remains.
"It is an absolute
disastrous mess," Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter told reporters.
"I have never seen anything like this in my life."
Officials declined to
speculate on the cause of the incident, though some experts suggested the crash
may have been caused due to a track defect or wheel failure.
Witnesses said the front
of Amtrak Train 188 shook as it went into a turn, and the six cars behind it
then went off the rails.
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Authorities said they had
no idea what caused the train wreck, which left some demolished rail cars
strewn upside down and on their sides in the city's Port Richmond neighborhood
along the Delaware River. (Reuters/Bryan Woolston)
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An estimated 243 people,
including five crew members, were aboard the train when it crashed around 9:30
pm (0130 GMT Wednesday).
Nutter warned that the
casualty and injury estimates were only preliminary, hinting at the potential
for a higher toll.
He also would not confirm
whether all those aboard the train had been accounted for.
Hydraulic tools had to be
used to remove passengers from some of the most badly damaged train cars,
firefighters said.
"I've never seen
anything so devastating. They are in pretty bad shape," said Fire
Commissioner Derrick Sawyer, referring to the train cars.
"You can see they
completely, completely derailed from the track, destroyed completely and
they've been overturned completely."
- Chaotic scenes -
Passengers recalled the
chaos of the derailment.
Former US Congressman
Patrick Murphy of Pennsylvania, who was on the train, said he was sitting on a
bench in the cafe car when the train began to topple.
"It went to my
right, then to my left. Everyone who was on the left side of the car, where I
was sitting, just got thrown completely over to the right side."
Murphy tweeted a photo
from inside a wrecked train car. He said he was uninjured and trying to assist
other passengers.
Murphy said the train
seemed to be going 60-70 miles per hour (around 100-110 kilometers per hour)
when it suddenly derailed and rolled. Passengers had to kick out a window to
escape.
Some of the injured --
many with bloodied hands and faces -- were unable to move, Murphy said.
Another passenger, Jeremy
Wladis, 51, was on the last car of the train when he felt the jolt. He said he
saw "phones, laptops, everything flying," the Philadelphia Inquirer
newspaper reported.
"There were women
launched up in the luggage rack," he said. "I don't even know how
they got there."
Hundreds of emergency
personnel, including firefighters and police, were deployed.
Emergency crews struggled
to search for survivors in the darkness, at first relying on flashlights to
comb the area. They were later aided by helicopters hovering overhead.
The workers used ladders
to climb over the flipped trains.
All service by Amtrak,
the national long-distance rail system, was canceled for the rest of the night
between Philadelphia and New York.
Nutter said the rails
were "completely wiped out" in the area of the accident, and that he
did not anticipate service through Philadelphia for the rest of the week.
- Crushed, overturned cars -
At least one of the train
cars appeared crushed and turned on its side. A large metal beam was rammed
into another car, though it was unclear whether it had fallen onto the car or
the car had crashed into it.
The engine car completely
separated from the rest of the train and one of the cars was perpendicular to
the rest.
The train had so much
force at the time of the crash that it bent the sturdy rail tracks in at least
one area.
Train 188, a Northeast
Regional rail service train, was scheduled to leave Washington at 7:10 pm (2310
GMT) and arrive in New York at 10:34 pm.
There are no seatbelts on
trains operated by Amtrak.
The US Department of
Homeland Security, the National Transportation Safety Board, the Southeastern
Pennsylvania Transportation Authority and other agencies were involved in
trying to understand the causes of the crash, along with Amtrak.
NTSB personnel were headed
to the scene of the crash and expected to arrive Wednesday.
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