Los Angeles County

Death on Rails – UPDATED – The Text Message

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UPDATE: CBS KCAL News has reported that the engineer
was likely texting a teenager, but Metrolink would not confirm and the National Transportation and Safety Board said they were reluctant (understandably) to deal in rumors.

However, I have additional material that suggests he KCAL story may very well be accurate.


Yesterday, a source with family who works inside Metrolink
also gave me this same information independently, saying that Metrolink has the information about the engineer’s text messaging having occurred just before the crash, but that they are not releasing it.

Here’s what Fox News had on the story:

Nick Williams, a teenage train enthusiast, told CBS2 in Los Angeles he exchanged three text messages with engineer Robert Sanchez Friday afternoon. Williams, who considered Sanchez a “mentor,” received the last text at 4:22 p.m., one minute before the train wreck, according to the ocregister.com report. Williams’ claims have not been confirmed.

UPDATE 2 – 1:15 pm Sunday: It is now my understanding from my source that Metrolink does indeed have the phone records confirming that the engineer was texting right before he blew the light, yet I have not been able to further confirm this.

Just a few minutes ago, I talked to Metrolink spokesman, Terry Williams, and he declined to comment on the text message story. I asked him if Metrolink had indeed recovered the engineer’s phone, he said he honestly didn’t know.

The NTSFB has yet to return my calls.

UPDATE 3: Monday, NTSFB says that no phone has been recovered as yet, so my tip sounds wrong.

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SATURDAY MORNING: Twenty-five dead…and counting. Obviously, I’m not bringing you news. Just posting to acknowledge that we know….and care.

Demonstrating their concern in a concrete way, today, a flood of Los Angeles residents showed up at the UCLA Blood & Platelet Center in order to donate blood, according to the LA Times.

Metrolink is providing updates here.

(Photo by Francine Orr, Los Angeles Times.)

5 Comments

  • Metrolink is saying (3:00 Times update) that its engineer failed to stop for a red light, and was among those killed. He’d worked for a subcontractor. Had he survived I’m sure he’d have felt tremendous guilt. What a tragedy indeed, the fickleness of life, all that. One guy killed was a teacher who’d just come with his wife and child from his mother’s funeral. How ironic, he should go right after her.

    Meanwhile, the tragedy in TX is being used by some to price-gauge on gas, with prices soaring already, even before there’s been any real effect, and the resulting rush to fuel up creating an actual shortage in some places. Bush is claiming he’ll punish anyone taking advantage — sure he will.

  • Even if the one train engineer died this collision should not have occurred, most critical track locations have redundant safety systems to avoid a single point failure (engineer sleeping) collision. Embedded track sensors should have also initiated an automatic emergency call to both trains, there had to be multiple failures for such a horrendous accident to occur. Also MTA trains aren’t the safest passenger trains available for purchase, I’m sure we will be reading more about both of these issues when the lawsuits begin.

    http://www.safetran.com/about.asp

  • WBC,

    There’s also this:

    Oil prices fell below $100 a barrel Sunday in a special early trading session as traders bet that Hurricane Ike did not cause significant damage to refineries.

    “The market is expressing some relief,” said Andrew Lebow, a broker at MF Global in New York. “We were worried on Friday that the storm surge would flood the refineries, but right now it looks like that was not the case.”

    “The storm surge was not 20 feet, it was more like 12 or 13 feet,” said Lebow. While preliminary reports showed that damage was not as bad as originally feared, the market was still waiting for more information from the region, he added.

    Obviously the price gougers were prepared regardless of the reality . . .

  • Lost Trains mentioned some of the factors but I have another – Isn’t this line CTC (Computerized Traffic Control) with turnouts and signals controlled from the dispatcher’s desk? How the engineer missses that I don’t know. Also there’s another guy with him to call out signals.

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