Death Toll From Spanish High-Speed Train Crash Hits 69, Including 4 Americans
A RENFE train slammed into the rear of a stopped IRYO train near Urda on Oct. 28; the transport minister blames a traffic controller while unions point to understaffing.
Four U.S. citizens are among at least 69 people killed when a high-speed train slammed into the rear of another train in central Spain last week, officials said Sunday.
Spain's Center for Integrated Data, the legal body that identifies victims of mass-casualty events, said Sunday night that the dead also include one citizen each from Canada, Japan, Argentina, Mexico, Tunisia and the Czech Republic. Agence France-Presse and local media reported that two Australians and one more Japanese citizen remain missing. The center had earlier announced the deaths of a French citizen, a Portuguese citizen and 54 Spaniards.
All but three of the victims have been identified. "As the contacted families have expressed their wish to travel to Spain to carry out in-person identification, we are awaiting their arrival in the country," the center said in its statement, according to AFP.
The collision happened on the morning of Oct. 28 in Urda, in the province of Toledo. A high-speed train hit the back of another train that had stopped, and two cars derailed. Officials said 58 people were injured. Both trains, carrying more than 540 people, were traveling from Madrid to Seville.
Independent investigators said their initial findings show the state-owned RENFE train was moving at between 100 and 125 mph when it struck the privately owned IRYO train.
Transport Minister Óscar Puente has blamed a traffic controller's poor judgment for much of what went wrong. Railway unions have pushed back. They say deteriorating working conditions and too few controllers handling growing workloads make it harder to keep millions of passengers safe, and they argue that blaming one employee ignores a systemic problem.
It was the second major crash on the Madrid-Seville line this year. In January, a train derailed more than two hours farther south on the same route and struck another traveling in the opposite direction, killing 46 people. That crash remains under investigation.
Spain's high-speed rail network is the second largest in the world after China's, and it has long been regarded as a success of state industrial policy. Until this year, it had recorded no fatal crashes since entering service more than three decades ago.
The back-to-back disasters have put pressure on the government and on RENFE over signaling, staffing and maintenance. The independent investigators have not yet issued a final cause for the Urda collision, and the earlier January accident has not been fully explained either. Families of victims from at least ten countries are now traveling to Spain to complete identifications and take part in the investigation process.
