Three firefighters and a dozen passengers were injured in Florida on Saturday when a fire truck drove around railroad crossings and into the path of a high-speed passenger train after waiting for another train to pass, according to a person. informed of what happened.
The accident occurred at 10:45 a.m. in busy downtown Delray Beach. The Brightline train was later stopped on the tracks, its front end destroyed, about a block from the Delray Beach fire truck. His ladder was torn off and on the grass several feet away, The Sun-Sentinel reported.
Delray Beach Fire Rescue said in a social media post that three Delray Beach firefighters were in stable condition at a hospital. Palm Beach County Fire Rescue took 12 people from the train to the hospital with minor injuries.
The person familiar with details of the accident, who was not authorized to disclose what happened due to the ongoing investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity, said the fire truck stopped at the crossing and waited for a freight train to pass. before maneuvering. crossed arms lowered.
Emmanuel Amaral rushed to the scene in his golf cart after hearing a loud crash and screeching brakes on the train from where he was having breakfast a couple of blocks away. He saw firefighters climb out of the front window of his disabled truck and pull his injured colleagues off the tracks. One of its helmets was left several hundred feet from the crash site.
“The front of that train is completely destroyed, and there were even some pieces of the fire truck stuck in the front of the train, but it split the car in half. “It broke the fire truck in half and debris was everywhere,” Amaral said.
Brightline did not immediately issue a statement about the accident.
The Federal Railroad Administration will investigate. A spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board said in the afternoon that it was still gathering information about the crash and had not yet decided whether it would investigate.
The NTSB is already investigating two accidents involving Brightline high-speed trains that killed three people earlier this year at the same crossing in Melbourne along the railroad’s route between Miami and Orlando.
More than 100 people have died after being hit by trains since Brightline began operating in July 2017, giving the railroad the worst fatality rate in the country. But most of those deaths have been suicides, pedestrians who tried to cross the tracks in front of a train, or drivers who walked through gates instead of waiting for the train to pass. Brightline has not been found to be at fault for those previous deaths.
Rail safety has been a concern since a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, in February 2023, spilling toxic chemicals that caught fire. Regulators urged the industry to improve safety and members of Congress proposed a reform package, but railroads have not made many major changes to their operations and the bill has stalled.
Earlier this month, both operators of a Union Pacific train died after it collided with a semi-trailer truck blocking a crossing in the small West Texas city of Pecos. Three other people were injured and the local Chamber of Commerce building was damaged. ___
Associated Press writers Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska, Chevel Johnson in New Orleans and Julie Walker in New York contributed
