First-person accounts from the Red Line crash
June 23, 2009
 |
| Rescue workers carry an injured Metro rider away from two trains that collided on the Red Line north of the Fort Totten Metro Station. (Examiner) |
Riders on the two Metro trains that crashed Monday afternoon told reporters from The Washington Examiner about their experiences when the trains collided:
Deborah Foster, Hagerstown
Foster was sitting in the third car from the front when her train struck the back of the train in front of it. She pushed the train’s intercom, but there was no response. Other passengers pulled the doors open, and she joined them in peering down the tracks.
“I saw the first car of our train straight up in the air,” she said.
Foster said she waited about 20 minutes before help arrived. She was not injured, but others were. As she walked past the train, she could see people bloody from the face down. “There were a lot of foot injuries, too,” Foster added.
Mike Corcoran, Baltimore
Corcoran was in the third car from the back of the train that was hit. There were four other people in his car when he felt the jolt. By then, he said, his train had been stopped for a “couple of minutes.”
Someone came into the car minutes later asking for shirts to stop the blood flowing from the injured, Corcoran said.
“I walked to the back car, the one that was hit,” he said. “The glass in the windows was shattered. There was blood all over the seats.”
Outside the train minutes later, “someone said there were people on top of the back train car injured,” Corcoran said. “I saw blood coming down from the top of the car.”
The front car of the other train was “split in half like a toy,” he said. “You could see the safety rails dangling.”
Melodye Crawford, Gaithersburg
Crawford got on the Red Line heading home to Shady Grove after working at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Her train rear-ended the stopped train.
When she was getting on her train, Crawford thought about getting in the first car so that she would be closer to her exit when the train got to her stop. But, she said, “I didn’t feel like walking,” so she got in the third car. She was sitting on a seat over the wheel well when she felt the car derail.
“When it stopped, I was like, ‘Thank God, I’m fine, I’m OK.’ ”
After disembarking from the train, she saw what had happened to the first car — the car she thought about getting on.
“Oh my God, I could have been on that train,” she said.
After the accident, Crawford was not pleased with how Metro handled the injured passengers and said Metro was sorely disorganized.
“Metro should have its act together,” she said as she and about a dozen other injured passengers walked up a hill to a bus that was waiting to take them to a local hospital. “This is not good, not good at all.”
Pheroza Doshi, Virginia
Doshi was in a middle car of the train that rear-ended the first train. She said she was reading when her train crashed into the parked train in front of it.
“There was no slowing down,” she said.
She said some people screamed after the crash, and smoke began to fill the car.
“That’s what scared everyone; we thought we were going to be on fire,” Doshi said.
Garrett Dorsey, Northwest D.C.
Dorsey said he was on the train that had been at a standstill for about 10 minutes before it was hit by another train. He said everyone in his car fell out of their seats after the impact. Seats that were under a transformer were blown out of their original positions, he said.
Dorsey said someone tried to use the emergency exit, but only one door opened. No one exited his car until rescue officials came, he said, because they were concerned that the tracks still might have electricity running through them. When he got out of the train, he took a picture of the point of impact of the two trains, with one car on top of another.
“It was like a blanket that someone tried to put on the other car.”
- Alan Suderman and Freeman Klopott
