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UPDATE 6:40 p.m.:
One Red Line train had been stopped on the tracks. It had just begun to move when it was struck from behind by a speeding train.
Brenda Payton was on the speeding train. “We just felt a big crunch and saw smoke and stuff. We got off the train as fast as we could.” Payton is from Fort Washington, and she was heading home. Another woman on that train, Anastasia McKeown, says that just before the impact, the ramming train slowed down. “Then we felt an impact just after that. You could tell we hit something that wasn’t an animal.”
Though McKeown was in the last car, she saw one of the plastic partitions in the ramming train fall on someone’s head. McKeown had back and neck injuries. A triage area for victims has been set up outside Jarvoe Jarboe Printing Co. People there are mostly folks who’ve been injured but are not in critical condition.
As for the stopped train, here’s one account of what happened. Dennis, who declined to give his last name, says his train had just barely started to move when the impact happened. Dennis stepped out of the train and could see “three or four people on the ground, all bloody.” Dennis was in the fifth car, one removed from the impact. After staggering out of the train, he spotted a woman on top of that sixth car, and blood was streaming down. “The interior of that car just got crushed,” said Dennis.
Thanks for the update.
I know from first-hand knowledge that there had been an earlier incident that had the Red Line massively backed up and probably had the nerve center going crazy as it was during the peak of rush hour. The media hasn’t caught on to this yet.
My bet is that somebody got in a hurry, overrode automatic controls, lost track of the trains, etc., etc. So tragic.
In the first car of the six-car Red Line train, on a sunny-day evening commute, passengers heard a message familiar to any Metrorail rider: The conductor said they were holding for a moment -- there was a train ahead.
The train started moving again, picking up to moderate speed.
Then, without even the squeal of brakes as a warning, there was a crash, and the feeling of being lifted up as the train hit one that was stopped.
Inside the car, there was dust and broken glass and blood. Seats had been ripped from the floor and thrown around: One man was trapped between two of them, with a leg that appeared broken. A woman was screaming, invisible, buried beneath a pile of seats.
But the most incredible thing was the floor itself. It was gone, peeled away. Passengers could look down and see the grooved-metal roof of another Metro train.
"The front of the train just opened up," said passenger Marcie Bacchus, 30, who was among a handful of passengers in the car at the center of the deadliest accident in Metro's 33-year history.
The crash happened about 5.p.m., on an above-ground stretch of track that runs through neighborhoods between the Fort Totten and Takoma stations. Authorities said one Red Line train rear-ended another, hitting with such force that its first car was thrown on top of the other train.
Brianna Milstead, 17, a high-school student from Waldorf, was in that car. She could see out the front window, and saw the other train getting closer -- though she saw it too late to react.
"It happened so quick," Milstead recalled, looking at her ash-covered hands. "The floor smushed up. It was lifted up. I saw the debris flying toward me. I was choking on the smoke."
Dave Bottoms, 39, had just left his job as an Army Chaplain at Walter Reed. The Anglican priest was in the back of the front car that slammed into the stopped train. When he saw the train buckling, it looked just like it would in the movies, he said.
"It felt like it was going in slow motion," he said. "I started praying."
In the chaotic moments after the crash, he walked to a young woman who had been pinned in between seats. She was hysterical, he said, but he began calming her--and the other passengers in the car.
The group began saying the Lord's Prayer in unison.
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