WASHINGTON — Don’t expect any quick answers about what caused the derailment of an Amtrak Northeast Regional train in Philadelphia Tuesday night, killing five people and injuring dozens.
That’s the word from NBC4 transportation reporter Adam Tuss, who spoke with WTOP at about 5:10 a.m. Wednesday.
Tuss, from what he called “a disastrous scene” in Philadelphia, said that he hasn’t yet seen National Transportation Safety Board investigators, but that he knows they were “launched” from Washington on Tuesday. Once they get there, he said “it very quickly becomes their scene.”
They’ll pick through the evidence and data thoroughly but slowly, Tuss said. As with the deadly smoke incident on Metro in January, people want fast answers, “but the NTSB doesn’t operate that way. … I don’t think anyone should be expecting a full report today.”
He does say that the information on the train equivalent of an airliner’s black boxes, known as the event recorder, can be downloaded remotely — investigators don’t have to find it.
CBS News transportation consultant Mark Rosenker, a former head of the NTSB, says that that ability will help the investigation, but won’t necessarily speed it up — it generally takes a year before the final report is filed.
Tuss adds that it’s clear the train “was going at a very high rate of speed,” but that speed limits are different on different sections of track. He says that it was found far from the tracks, near a turn, indicating a high rate of speed.
He said that he’d heard first-person accounts of the train slowing down and shaking before derailing, but also that one woman said “she was sitting in her seat, and all of a sudden could taste dirt. It literally happened that fast.”
