A suburban New York train derailed today, killing at least four people and injuring 63, including 11 critically, when all seven cars of a Metro-North train ran off the tracks on a curved section of the line, officials said.
The crash happened at 7:20 a.m. (1220 GMT) about 100 yards (metres) north of Metro North’s Spuyten Duyvil station in the city’s Bronx borough, said Metro North spokesman Aaron Donovan.
A Fire Department spokesman confirmed the number of dead and said 11 people were in critical condition, six were in serious condition with non-life threatening injuries and another 46 suffered minor injuries.
The train, headed south toward Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal, was about half full at the time of the crash with about 150 passengers, said the state’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), parent company of Metro North.
«On a workday, fully occupied, it would have been a tremendous disaster,» New York City Fire Commissioner Salvatore Joseph Cassano told reporters at the scene.
At least one rail car was lying toppled near the water in an area where the Hudson and Harlem rivers meet. Other cars were lying on their sides.
There was no official word yet on possible causes of the accident.
Passenger Frank Tatulli told television station WABC he had been riding in the first car and that the train had been traveling «a lot faster» than usual.
«The guy was going real fast on the turns and I just didn’t know why because we were making good time. And all of a sudden we derailed on the turn,» he said.
Joseph Bruno, who heads the city’s Office of Emergency Management, told CNN it appeared that three of the four people killed had been ejected from the train. The MTA and the fire department both said that could not immediately be confirmed.
Michael Keaveney, 22, a security worker whose home overlooks the site, said he had heard a loud bang when the train derailed.
«It woke me up from my sleep,» he said. «It looked like (the train) took out a lot of trees on its way over toward the water.»
Source: Buenos Aires Herald