A conductor was in the cab with the train engineer before a deadly derailment in Washington state — and the train’s brakes engaged automatically and not due to any human actions, a federal transportation board member said Tuesday.
“Absolutely distraction is one of our most-wanted-list priorities at NTSB,” National Transportation Safety Board member Bella Dinh-Zarr said at a news conference Tuesday, although she added that the federal board has not determined a cause of the deadly accident outside Tacoma.
Related: ‘Positive Train Control’ ordered by Congress, but not yet in place
Three people were killed when the Amtrak train headed from Seattle to Portland, Oregon, careened off a bridge at around 7:33 a.m. PT.
The train was speeding, traveling at 80 mph in a 30-mph stretch of track, investigators have already said.
All of the crew members on the train were injured and were hospitalized, and investigators are making arrangements to interview them, Dinh-Zarr said.
Related: Two ‘passionate advocates’ of rail travel among the dead in crash
A conductor “who was getting experience and familiarizing himself with the territory” was in the cab with the engineer, she said, while the train’s actual conductor was in the passenger area. Being familiar with the territory is one of the duties of the conductor, she said.
“As far as exactly what they were doing, we will be talking with them and finding that out,” Dinh-Zarr said. It is standard protocol at the NTSB to look at all of the cell phone records of all the crew members after an accident, she said.
Data recorders have been recovered from the rear and lead locomotives, Dinh-Zarr said. The lead engine’s inward and outward facing cameras have also been recovered but “they were, unfortunately, significantly damaged — you saw the terrible destruction of this accident,” she said.
The train was slated to get Positive Train Control — technology that can automatically slow or stop trains traveling too fast — but it had not yet been installed on that train, Dinh-Zarr said.
The NTSB has long recommended that all trains feature the technology, but Congress pushed back a deadline for installation that had been set for the end of 2015, and instead gave train companies until the end of 2018 to put the systems in place nationwide, Dinh-Zarr said.
Related: What can engineer of deadly train derailment reveal to investigators?
Tuesday afternoon Washington Gov. Jay Inslee vowed that a thorough investigation would determine what went wrong and what can be done to prevent other accidents, and urged people not to jump to conclusions.
“All of us owe a debt of gratitude not only to the professional first responders but to the volunteers who got bout of their cars and helped their fellow Washingtonians make it through this tragedy,” Inslee said.
Eighty passengers were on the train when it derailed, officials said.
“I saw the train hanging off,” said Daniel Konzelman, an Eagle Scout who was driving by.
He and others put on headlamps and sprinted along the tracks top reach the train and helped people down to the freeway, and he climbed in to a car through a broken window to see who needed help. “A lot of people were in a lot of pain,” he said.
But Konzelman downplayed his heroism. “I don’t know,” he said. “If it wasn’t me, somebody else would have been there to do it, so I was just thankful that I got to be there helping.”
President Donald Trump on Monday had tweeted his condolences to the victims after saying that “the train accident that just occurred in DuPont, WA shows more than ever why our soon to be submitted infrastructure plan must be approved quickly.”
But Inslee said Tuesday that there is no evidence yet that infrastructure was to blame. “So the president did not follow my advice, which is let’s not to jump to conclusions before we make decisions,” he said.