A train crash in Hoboken, New Jersey, left at least one person dead and 108 people injured on Thursday.
A New Jersey Transit train derailed during the morning rush hour and crashed into Hoboken terminal, one of the busiest stations in the state and a huge commuter hub for those traveling to and from New York City.
The dead victim was a woman who was hit by debris while waiting at the terminal, New Jersey governor Chris Christie said at a press conference, adding that most of the injuries were suffered by people on the train.
“The silver lining is there has only been one fatality so far,” New York governor Andrew Cuomo added.
“These are difficult times over these past weeks and months; between terrorist attacks, natural disasters, we have had our hands full in this country, we have had our hands full in the north-east,” Cuomo said. Earlier in September, Ahmad Khan Rahami was arrested for planting multiple bombs across New York and New Jersey.
Michael Larson, a New Jersey Transit employee, said he saw the train come into the station at a high speed, hop over the bumper block, and travel 40ft before hitting the waiting room and coming to a rest.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Larson told CBS. “It was initially, just a horrendous, horrendous exploding noise. Concrete dust, electrical wires and the train flying into the depot.” He said people were kicking out the windows of the train to try to escape the wreckage.
Christie confirmed 108 people had been injured on the train, which was carrying 250 passengers.Injured passengers have been transferred to the Hoboken University medical center and Jersey medical center by New Jersey Transit buses, officials said. Each hospital had about 40 “walking” patients, with roughly 10 in emergency care in Hoboken, and eight in Jersey City.
“We’re all hands are on deck, all our surgeons, our specialty surgeons as well as our critical care nurses,” a spokesperson for the Hoboken University Medical Center said.
“I was thrown into the chair in front. I banged my leg,” said Maria, a 40-year-old woman limping beside her 19-year-old son outside of the medical center.
She said she had been commuting from New Milford, New Jersey, to Hoboken when the accident happened. “People were so scared. Me and another lady were hurt.” She would not give her surname, though she said she worked “in accounting”.
“The woman sitting beside me was so good to me, she wouldn’t leave until she knew I was OK.”
Inside Jersey City Medical Center, the closest trauma center to the site of the crash, workers described emptying out the cafeteria to make room for the sheer volume of patients from the accident.
“We had to basically shut down the whole cafeteria because we didn’t have enough space,” said Gilbert Salgado, a sanitation worker inside the hospital. “They had them just sitting down trying to treat them. It was completely full.”
Most of the patients who arrived were not in serious condition, said Mario Castillo, a nurse’s assistant. “Thank God the patients were not grave patients,” he said.
Near the station, the scene remained chaotic at 11am, with dozens of emergency vehicles in attendance with their sirens going and media attempting to film evidence of destruction outside the station.
The train had left Spring Valley, New York, at 7.23am and crashed at 8.45am, authorities said.
Freight train conductor William Blaine, 53, said he felt “death was following” him after he saw the train crash.
He said he was just outside of view of the train in a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts when he heard a “kaboom” and “the whole place shook”. He ran to the track, he said, to try to help.
Blaine said the train came into Hoboken station fast – at around 30mph. Typically, he said, a train would slow down as it pulled into the station at 30, then 20, 15, and then one or two miles per hour until it hit a bumper at the end of the platform.
Blaine also said he stepped over the dead body of a woman, who may have been hit by falling iron and steel debris. Officials did not confirm this to the Guardian.
The Hoboken incident marks the fourth train crash in the past three years along the eastern seaboard, something critics say highlights the dire state of infrastructure and safety technology on trains in the US.
New Jersey Transit has consistently delayed installing safety technology that would prevent accidents by automatically slowing or stopping trains when they are going too fast, a system known as positive train control (PTC). The federal government has consistently extended the deadline, which is now set at 2018, at the request of the railroads.
The most deadly incident was last year, when an Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia after going too fast around a curve. The crash left eight people dead and more than 200 injured. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) ruled that it could have been prevented by PTC.
The NTSB reached the same conclusion about a 2013 accident in New York, which left four people dead and 61 injured. It was New York’s deadliest train crash in more than two decades.
Federal and local investigators from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, NTSB, and Federal Railroad Administration were on the way to the scene to investigate the causes of Thursday’s crash and survey the extent of the damage.
Speaking from Washington DC, the NTSB’s vice-chairman, Bella Dinh-Zarr, said the agency would be assessing the role that PTC could have played in the system.
“We are ready to hit the ground running,” Dinh-Zarr said.
Governors Cuomo and Christie said that it was premature to say PTC could have prevented the accident until the cause was verified.
“We know what happened, we don’t know why it happened,” said Cuomo.
Earlier, Christie told CNN there was nothing to indicate the crash was anything more than an accident.
Witnesses have said the driver of the train was passed out at the front of the first car when the train came into the platform. It remains unclear if the train was equipped with an “alerter” system, which sounds an alarm if the engineer is inactive for 25 seconds, and initiates brakes after a further 15 seconds.
The crash left the terminal severely damaged with steel infrastructure exposed and hanging from the ceiling.
New Jersey Transit trains were not running into Hoboken in the wake of the crash and several roads leading to Hoboken were closed by police. The train terminal is more than 100 years old, and repairs will probably be protracted. Given that Hoboken is major transit hub through which all major train, bus and ferry traffic that connects the states of New Jersey and New York runs, it could have a serious impact on transportation in the region.
Hoboken is NJ Transit’s fifth-busiest station with 15,000 boardings per weekday, and is the final stop for several train lines and a transfer point for many commuters on their way to New York City.
NJ Transit provides more than 200m passenger trips annually on bus, rail and light rail lines. More than 100,000 people use NJ Transit trains to commute from New Jersey into New York City daily.
Cuomo cancelled a trip to Israel for Shimon Peres’s funeral because of the crash.
