Excess speed caused a fatal metro-train accident in the Spanish city of Valencia, a regional minister said on Tuesday, and there are suggestions the train driver may have been ill or unconscious at the controls.
At the moment of the accident on Monday, in which 41 people died, the black box recorder showed the train was travelling ”too fast”, at 80kph on a curve on which there is a speed limit of 40kph, regional infrastructure minister Jose Ramon Garcia Anton told reporters in Valencia.
”All other possibilities [to explain the accident] are ruled out, ” he said after a meeting between the unions, metro safety staff and the head of the Valencia metro, the responsibility of the regional government.
”The tunnel did not cave in”, nor ”was it damaged”, the wheels were ”in perfect condition” and the ”carriages were not too full”, he said.
The black box also showed that the train driver, who died in the accident, ”did not react to the speed” and ”there must have been a sort of loss of consciousness, of fainting”, railway trade union spokesperson Jose Aroca said after the meeting.
For his part Garcia Anton spoke of ”an indisposition” of the driver as being the reason for the excess speed.
All but one of the people killed in the accident Monday — 29 women and 12 men — have been identified, according to the sub-prefect of Valencia, Luis Felipe Martinez.
”There is still one unidentified body,” he said, adding that among the 39 injured persons was an 11-year-old girl whose mother died in the crash.
King Juan Carlos, Queen Sofia and Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriquez Zapatero — who cut short a visit to India — will attend the funerals of the victims at Valencia Cathedral, scheduled to begin on Tuesday evening.
The city came to a standstill for five minutes at noon local time, a symbolic gesture in memory of the victims that was duplicated in the capital Madrid on its central Puerta del Sol square.
More than a million pilgrims are gathering in Valencia four days ahead of a visit by Pope Benedict XVI to the Roman Catholic Church’s fifth World Family Meeting.
Family members of the dead, meanwhile, filed through the city morgue to identify their loved ones, many clearly in shock and most hiding their emotions behind dark glasses.
Nearly half of those killed — 18 of 41 — came from the small suburban town of Torrent. ”It is an impossible misfortune for a town to digest,” Torrent’s mayor, Josep Bresco, said in a barely audible voice outside the morgue. ”I am devastated and inconsolable.”
Two cranes above ground on Tuesday at a location corresponding to the crash site below were set to use cables lowered through a hole cut in the blacktop to straighten up and then tow the derailed train cars.
The cranes were installed between rows of eight-storey brick buildings draped with the Vatican’s white-and-yellow flags.
Four large white tents set up Monday for the dead and injured were still in place Tuesday, obscuring the ”Jesus” entrance of the Metro, the one closest to the accident.
With Spain still shaken by the Madrid train bombing of 2004 that killed 191 people, officials were quick to exclude foul play in Valencia.
An interior ministry spokesperson said any terrorist link had been ”completely ruled out”. — AFP
