The person in charge of investigating an Amtrak crash for the National Transportation Safety Board did not have much to offer anxious reporters.
To almost every question posed, Ryan Frigo gave some variant of "that's something that we will be looking at."
It
will take time for investigators to determine exactly what went wrong
and explain why the Amtrak passenger train crashed into a backhoe on a
track near Philadelphia, killing two people Sunday.
"We're still gathering the facts," Frigo said.
Here's a look at what we know -- and don't know -- so far:
The investigation
NTSB
officials will be looking at multiple factors that may have played into
the crash: mechanical, operations, signal, track, human performance and
survival.
Frigo said that the event data recorder and forward-facing and inward-facing video from the locomotive have been recovered.
The
big unanswered questions: Why the backhoe was on the track near
Chester, just south of Philadelphia? Why did the train continue its
route from New York to Savannah, Georgia, when Amtrak construction
workers may have been on the track?
And why didn't the construction workers move if a train was coming?
The
person in charge of investigating an Amtrak crash for the National
Transportation Safety Board did not have much to offer anxious
reporters.
To almost every question posed, Ryan Frigo gave some variant of "that's something that we will be looking at."
It
will take time for investigators to determine exactly what went wrong
and explain why the Amtrak passenger train crashed into a backhoe on a
track near Philadelphia, killing two people Sunday.
"We're still gathering the facts," Frigo said.
Here's a look at what we know -- and don't know -- so far:
The investigation
NTSB
officials will be looking at multiple factors that may have played into
the crash: mechanical, operations, signal, track, human performance and
survival.
Frigo said that the event data recorder and forward-facing and inward-facing video from the locomotive have been recovered.
The
big unanswered questions: Why the backhoe was on the track near
Chester, just south of Philadelphia? Why did the train continue its
route from New York to Savannah, Georgia, when Amtrak construction
workers may have been on the track?
And why didn't the construction workers move if a train was coming?
But the mess wasn't confined to the track, Hills said.
"I
looked outside, and it looked like we were in this brown cloud," he
said, speculating that the dustiness came from construction or high
winds. "We were rolling into this storm, this sandstorm."
That's when passengers started panicking. Then the train slammed into the backhoe.
Hills said the impact didn't feel severe from the second passenger car, where he was sitting.
"There
was tremendous impact on the first car," Hills said. He said the roof
of that car was torn open, and several windows were broken.
"It feels like a nightmare," he said. "It felt like this is that experience that I've feared in the past.Limited service
Amatrak said it was providing limited service between Philadelphia and Wilmington, Delaware, as the Federal Railroad Administration and NTSB investigate.
The crash came less than a month after an Amtrak train headed from Chicago to Los Angeles details in Karas injuring 32 people.
It also came almost a year after another strick detailment near philadephai-- one that left eight people dead and more than 200 injured.
Amrak driver 188 i dont remember anything before crush
Sunday's crash near Philadelphia made Hills consider whether he should fly more.
"I
rely on Amtrak a lot, and I travel for my job in the Northeast Corridor
a lot," said Hills, who works in the specialty food industry. "This
incident has really fed my fears."
But is it enough to make him stop riding trains?
"Unfortunately, no. We rely on it too much in this part of the country."
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