Three people were killed Monday when the opening of a highly touted new rail link outside Tacoma, Washington, ended with the inaugural train derailing and careening off a bridge onto a highway below, officials said.
Multiple sources, including federal law enforcement, told NBC News that they are looking into the possibility that the train was speeding at 80 mph in a 30 mph zone.
Washington State Police spokeswoman Brooke Bova said that roughly 100 people were transported to hospitals after the 7:33 a.m. PT crash that left several rail cars on the roadway and one dangling from the bridge. Five cars and a pair of trucks were involved in the highway pileup, but no motorists were killed, officials said. Rescue workers were still searching the wreckage for victims in the early afternoon.
The National Transportation Safety Board said Monday afternoon that federal investigators were on their way to the site, about 20 miles south of Tacoma. It is not clear what caused the crash. But an Amtrak official said the train was not using a technology called positive train control, which can prevent derailments caused by excessive speed.
There were 77 passengers and seven crew members on board Train 501 of Amtrak’s Cascades service that set out at 6 a.m. from Seattle headed south to Portland, Oregon, authorities said. The train was traveling on newly refurbished tracks that are part of a new route designed to offer speedier service south of Tacoma. Some local leaders had expressed concerns about the project, saying it was dangerous for high-speed trains to operate so close to a highway.
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Officials have not said how fast the train was traveling when it crashed.
Passenger Chris Karnes told MSNBC that the train had just passed the city of Dupont and appeared to be traveling between 70 mph and 80 mph when it jumped the tracks.
“At a certain point the train started to wobble a little bit, and the next thing that we knew we were down in a ditch,” Karnes, a member of a local transportation advisory group, said. “The train had crumpled.”
He spoke as a rescue operation was still underway, describing injured people being lifted out of the wreckage.
In recordings of emergency radio conversations, a member of the train crew told a dispatcher briefly what happened.
“We were coming around the corner to take the bridge over I-5 there, uh, right north of Nisqually and we went on the ground,” the crew member said.
By then, rescue workers had started arriving.
“When we got to the scene it was obvious that there were some fatalities and there were a lot of injuries and some people were able to get off the train,” Detective Ed Troyer, a spokesman for the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department, told reporters. “Multiple cars and trucks were struck by train cars that left the train tracks and went down onto the road.”
Troyer said that even though the crash site was “pretty horrific,” no one in any of the vehicles was killed. “The fatals are all contained to the train,” he said.
One witness, Kolter Raudebauga, told NBC affiliate KING that the train seemed to have “nosedived,” leaving it “dangling off the ramp there, off the track.”
Another witness, Dan Konzelman, told MSNBC that he climbed onto the tracks after the crash and joined others helping victims while waiting for emergency crews to arrive.
“Some of them couldn’t move they had neck or back injuries, so we assigned people to stay there with them and keep them calm,” Konzelman said. “And then we worked our way down to more serious injuries where people were pinned underneath the trains that had flipped upside down, and unfortunately there were some deceased.”
Amtrak service south of Seattle was temporarily suspended, the company said.
The derailment happened on a newly established Amtrak route aimed at adding more frequent, more reliable and faster service between Seattle and Portland, part of an $800 million project called the Cascades High-Speed Rail Capital Program.
The new route, called the Point Defiance Bypass Project, was billed as an improvement over lines that hugged the scenic Puget Sound but included tight curves and single-track tunnels. The new route uses an existing rail line that runs along Interstate 5 from south Tacoma through Dupont before reconnecting with the main line. The improvements also included a new Amtrak station in Tacoma.
The tracks on the bypass, previously owned by BSNF Railway and used for freight and military transport, were taken over and refurbished by SoundTransit, a local transportation agency, as part of the rerouting project, officials said. The Cascades service is jointly owned by the state transportation departments in Washington and Oregon, with Amtrak running the service as a contractor and maintaining responsibility for day-to-day operations.
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Don Anderson, mayor of Lakewood, a city along the new route, said he was among many in the area concerned about the speed of the trains that would be traveling through their communities. He said he was part of an unsuccessful bid to stop the switch, or change it.
“Our community has been very concerned about the safety of this modification of the rail route for several years,” Anderson told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell.
President Donald Trump first tweeted that the crash was a reason to support his planned infrastructure bill.
The president soon followed up by tweeting: “My thoughts and prayers are with everyone involved in the train accident in DuPont, Washington. Thank you to all of our wonderful First Responders who are on the scene. We are currently monitoring here at the White House.”
On the prior route, along the Puget Sound, an Amtrak Cascades service train derailed in July with 267 people on board as it approached a drawbridge, leaving several injured.
Monday’s crash was the first fatal railway accident since May 12, 2015, when an Amtrak train derailed outside Philadelphia, killing eight people and injuring more than 200. Three months before, a Metro-North Railroad train hit an SUV on a crossing in Valhalla, New York, killing the car’s driver and five on the train.
This is a developing story, please check back for updates.