15 hurt in Florida when train hits fire truck that drove onto tracks after another train passed
Three firefighters and a dozen passengers were injured Saturday in Florida when a fire truck with its lights flashing drove along the arms of the tracks and into the path of a high-speed passenger train after waiting for another train to pass, according to a video of the incident and a person who was informed of what had happened.
The crash happened at 10:45 a.m. in busy downtown Delray Beach. In the aftermath, the Brightline train was stopped on the tracks, its front end destroyed, about a block away from the Delray Beach Fire Rescue truck. The ladder was torn off and a few meters away in the grass, The Sun-Sentinel reports this.
Delray Beach Fire Rescue said in a social media post that three Delray Beach firefighters were in stable condition at a hospital. Palm Beach County Fire Rescue took 12 people from the train to the hospital with minor injuries.
The person familiar with details of the crash, who was not authorized to reveal what happened because of the ongoing investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity, said the fire truck stopped at the intersection and waited for a freight train to pass by before driving around. the lowered crossed arms.
Video of the collision shows the fire truck driving around cars stopped at the intersection with their lights flashing to cross the double tracks.
Emmanuel Amaral rushed to the scene in his golf cart after hearing a loud crash and screeching train brakes from where he was having breakfast a few blocks away. He watched as firefighters climbed out of the front window of their damaged truck and pulled injured colleagues away from the track. One of their helmets landed several hundred meters away from the crash.
“The front of that train was completely destroyed, and there were even some parts of the fire truck stuck in the front of the train, but that split the car in two. It split the fire truck in half and debris was everywhere,” Amaral said.
A Brightline safety official said the entire community is involved in ensuring rail safety and that drivers should never drive past closed gates.
The Federal Railroad Administration will investigate. A spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board said in the afternoon that it was still gathering information about the crash and had not yet decided whether to investigate.
The NTSB does already investigating Two accidents involving Brightline high-speed trains killed three people early this year at the same intersection in Melbourne along the Miami-Orlando rail line.
Since Brightline opened in July 2017, more than 100 people have died after being hit by trains, giving the railway the highest fatality rate in the country. But most of these deaths are suicides, pedestrians trying to run across the tracks in front of a train, or drivers walking around the gate instead of waiting for a train to pass. Brightline has been found not guilty of these previous deaths.
Railway safety has been a concern since a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, in February 2023, releasing toxic chemicals that caught fire. Regulators urged the industry to improve safety and members of Congress proposed a package of reforms, but the railroads have not made many major changes to their operations and the bill has stalled.
Earlier this month, the two operators of a Union Pacific train were killed it collided with a tractor-trailer truck blocking an intersection in the small West Texas town of Pecos. Three other people were injured and the local Chamber of Commerce building was damaged. ___
Associated Press writers Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska, Chevel Johnson in New Orleans and Julie Walker in New York contributed.