Investigations into Spain’s worst rail disaster in more than 40 years – which has left at least 80 people dead and more than 160 injured, many of them seriously – are zeroing in on the driver after officials confirmed that excessive speed caused the train to career off the rails.
The eight-carriage service broke up and slammed into a wall as it rounded a bend near Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain at around 8.40pm on Wednesday. The train from Madrid to Ferrol was thought to be travelling at 190kph (120mph), more than double the 80kph limit on that section of the track. The impact was so great that one of the carriages went up an embankment and came to rest several metres above the rails.
A makeshift morgue was set up at a sports centre close to the crash site today, while hospitals in the city were overwhelmed by residents arriving to donate blood. The British embassy in Madrid confirmed that one Briton was among those injured.
The driver has been identified as Francisco Jose Garzon, 52, who was trapped briefly in the cabin and suffered minor injuries. He has been placed under formal investigation, although he had not been arrested this evening. A second driver, who is not thought to have been in the cabin at the time of the crash, was being treated in hospital.
According to Renfe, the state-owned company that operates the train, Mr Garzon said over his radio before the accident that he was going too fast, shouting as he went into the bend: “I’m on 190kph!” After the derailment – which caused explosions that set parts of the wreckage on fire – he asked the nearby station: “I’ve derailed – what do I do?” He then added: “I hope there are no dead, because this will fall on my conscience.”
Julio Gómez-Pomar, the president of Renfe, told Cadena Cope, a Spanish radio network, that Mr Garzon had been working for the company for 30 years and had been driving trains along the track where the accident occurred since 2010.
The investigation is likely to examine Mr Garzon’s Facebook page, which was taken down this morning but not before Spanish news outlets had seen photographs he had shared of his train’s speedometer registering more than 200kph.
In reply to the picture, posted in March last year, a friend had written: “If you get caught by the Guardia Civil [Spanish police], you’ll be left without your [licence] points.”
Mr Garzon replied: “It would be fun to speed parallel to the Guardia Civil and pass by them making their speed radar jump, he-he, what a fine the Renfe would get!”
While human error may have played a part in the disaster, the train’s computerised safety systems are also being examined. The curve where the accident happened is controlled by an automatic speed-monitoring system that is standard across Spain’s railway network, and is designed to stop trains or slow them down if the driver ignores the signals or speed limits. The train contains a black-box style recorder that is now in the hands of investigators.
Today Santiago de Compostela should have been celebrating the annual Festival of St James, one of Europe’s biggest Christian events that draws pilgrims from across the continent to celebrate the apostle whose remains are said to be held in the city’s cathedral. Instead locals were dragging victims from the wreckage, some alive, some not.
At the side of the tracks bodies were lined up and covered, with the sound of mobile phones ringing from the wrecked carriages and from under the sheets covering the dead. The Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy – who was born in the city – visited the crash site and declared three days of national mourning. He said the thoughts of all Spaniards were with those affected by the accident, and King Juan Carlos II also cancelled his official duties.
The Minister for Transport, Ana Pastor, gave her condolences to the families of the victims and expressed her hopes for a quick recovery for all those injured. “It is very important that families, victims and citizens learn the cause of what happened,” she said. “We are focused on attending the families and victims, so everything is done as quickly as possible.”
A Renfe spokesman said speed control systems on its services are usually determined by the type of train, but the company has refused to disclose the set-up on the service that derailed. The Alvia class 730 was only put into service last year and had passed routine safety inspections on the morning of the crash. It has a top speed of 250kph on high-speed tracks and 220kph on normal rails. Spanish trains are among the newest in the world and the country’s safety record is significantly better than the European average.
