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'Multiple Injuries' In Trolley Collision in Boston
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by Amy Judd | May 28, 2008 at 03:31 pm
906 views | 24 Recommendations | 10 comments
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UPDATED: 9:27p.m. EDT Female operator trapped in crash
Hours after two Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority trolleys
collided in Newton, crews continued to work tirelessly to free the
female driver of one of the trolleys from the twisted wreckage on
Wednesday.Pesaturo said there were "multiple injuries" in the crash, and one passenger was flown by helicopter to a Boston hospital.
Newton-Wellesley
Hospital said eight patients were being treated and were in stable
condition. Five passengers were treated at the scene and the trolleys'
three other operators were not injured, Pesaturo said.
Rescue crews are currently on scene of a serious crash between two trolleys in Newton, Boston.
Crews were calling for the Jaws of Life, indicating that at least one person was trapped in the wreckage, NewsCenter 5's Mary Saladna reported.The crash happened on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's Green Line D branch near the Woodland stop at about 6 p.m. Wednesday. Both trolleys were derailed in the collision, and some cars' wheels were ripped off in the crash.
Barry, a passenger on one of the trains, said his trolley was rear-ended by another trolley between the Woodland and Waban stops. He said he was thrown forward in the collision, and both knees on his pants were ripped. He said he feared some people may have been trapped.
"All of a sudden I stood up and, supposedly, a train came behind us and rear-ended us. And then all of a sudden, I was thrown to the front and hit the part where the driver sits. And I looked up, and all of a sudden, people were trapped underneath the train," he said.
Passengers said they did not have any warning before the collision.
"All of a sudden we rear-ended something," passenger Jill Davidson said. "There was a guy sitting next to me and he went flying and he hit the front of the train. We looked out the window, and the car in front of us was knocked off the tracks, and there was fire being shot into the woods. And we had to run off the train pretty much."
From Sky5, shaken commuters could be seen being helped from the cars by emergency crews, and some people could be seen on backboards. Several ambulances and medical helicopters were called to the scene, and a triage center was been set up on a golf course next to the tracks.
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (10)
at 15:33 on May 28th, 2008
I think this is an important story and would benefit from other NowPublic contributors working on it. I've flagged it as News Wanted and invite others in relevant locations to look for more evidence.
at 15:36 on May 28th, 2008
amyjudd, this is a breaking story. If new developments justify it, I'll renew this flag for another cycle.
at 16:09 on May 28th, 2008
Source: thebostonchannel.com
at 16:52 on May 28th, 2008
a
[q
url=http://www.thebostonchannel.com/mostpopular/16418109/detail.html]Brian
O'Day, spokesman for Newton Wellesley Hospital, located just a half mile from
the crash, said the center is prepared to care for injured passengers.
"We are not getting an accurate number of how many casualties we may expect.
I am told that both trains have been emptied and that right at this minute, it
didn't appear that anyone that was critically injured was en route to us," he
said.[/q]
at 18:19 on May 28th, 2008
"The first one was stopped at a red signal and was ready to proceed to the station when it was struck," MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo said.
Pesaturo said there were "multiple injuries" in the crash, and one passenger was flown by helicopter to a Boston hospital. Newton-Wellesley Hospital said eight patients were being treated and were in stable condition. Five passengers were treated at the scene and the trolleys' three other operators were not injured, Pesaturo said.
Barry Gallup, a passenger on one of the trains, said his trolley was rear-ended by another trolley between the Woodland and Waban stops. He said he was thrown forward in the collision, and both knees on his pants were ripped. He said he feared some people may have been trapped.
"All of a sudden I stood up and, supposedly, a train came behind us and rear-ended us. And then all of a sudden, I was thrown to the front and hit the part where the driver sits. And I looked up, and all of a sudden, people were trapped underneath the train," he said.
Passengers said they did not have any warning before the collision.
"All of a sudden we rear-ended something," passenger Jill Davidson said. "There was a guy sitting next to me and he went flying and he hit the front of the train. We looked out the window, and the car in front of us was knocked off the tracks, and there was fire being shot into the woods. And we had to run off the train pretty much."
There is raw video of the collision site via WCVB Boston
at 19:05 on May 28th, 2008
amyjudd, I like this story. It's good stuff.
at 20:20 on May 28th, 2008
amyjudd,What is this train derailment day?
at 21:11 on May 28th, 2008
Crews worked for hours to free the driver's body from the twisted wreckage. Her father told reporters gathered at Newton-Wellesley Hospital that his daughter was the driver and she had died in the crash. The woman's name and age have not been released.
via WCVB Boston
at 21:51 on May 28th, 2008
amyjudd, I like this story. It's good stuff.
at 22:49 on May 28th, 2008
The operator was Terrese Edmonds of South Boston, said her father, Terry Jones. Edmonds, 24, had been on the job since August, he said.
"My daughter died. I'm sorry I have to go," he said in a brief telephone interview.
~~~
Frank Lam, 41, of Natick was commuting home from his computer job in the frontmost trolley.
"Basically, what happened is we were at a stop, and we just got plowed into by second train," he said.
He said a few people were thrown around at the time of the impact, but "for the most part everybody was able to walk off the train."
He said he went to the trolley behind to see if he could help and found one woman trapped but conscious, "wedged into a corner," and then went out to the front of the trolley and saw through an opening a blue shirt that appeared to belong to the train operator.
"All I saw was a T blue shirt. It looked like her back or something," he said.
Peter Knudson, a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board, said the federal agency is sending 10 investigators to probe the crash. They are expected to produce a final report in 12 to 18 months.
“Any time there’s an accident of this nature and this seriousness, where the commuter trains have actually collided with each other, that’s a very substantial safety issue and we need to understand how that happened," Knudson said in a telephone interview.
Matt Stone, 46, an accounting manager from Framingham, was also sitting in the frontmost trolley, on his way to pick up his car at the Riverside station at the tail end of the same commute he has made for the past 3 years.
“We were stopped and all of a sudden we got hit from behind and there was no warning, nothing,” Stone said. “There was two separate impacts: the first knocked me off my seat, the next knocked me across the aisle.”
Stone was lightly bruised. Most of the 20 to 25 people on his train were not seriously injured, but a few appeared to be badly hurt, he said.
“One woman hit her face on the seat and had blood from a cut on her nose,” Stone said. “There was a 70-year-old old guy who went ballistic screaming at the conductor, ‘You killed my wife! You killed my wife!’ And the wife is going, ‘I’m OK! I’m OK.’”
After the crash, “Somebody started saying, ‘The train behind is on fire, and we got to get outta here,’” Stone said. The passengers got off, briefly got on another train that was facing the opposite direction, then got off that train because it was stuck behind the crash, and walked along the tracks to the Riverside Station.
Jack Condon, 74, a Dorset Road resident, said, "I was going for a walk and I heard a crash and I said 'Uh-oh, this is a bad one' and then I heard what I thought were a couple of explosions, or at least they sounded like they were explosions."
He said he thought it might be a car accident on the nearby highway and then he saw "all the ambulances, and that's when I knew it was a train."
via boston.com Michael Levenson and Rachana Rathi of the Globe staff contributed to this report, along with Globe correspondents John M. Guilfoil, Jill Jorgensen, and Matt Collette.