The words are haunting.
"The accident may have been prevented."
Those are the words of Joe Gordon. He's an investigator with the National Transportation Board. He was talking about the lax safety standards that infected the culture at Amtrak and played a role in the fatal April 2016 crash that claimed the lives of two workers and injured dozens of others in Chester.
A southbound Amtrak train slammed into a backhoe that was doing maintenance work on the tracks.
Two Amtrak employees who were on the backhoe were killed.
The NTSB Tuesday released their findings on the cause of the crash - and they did not mince words.
They concluded that years of cutting corners, bending the rules and otherwise putting safety concerns in the back seat created the atmosphere in which the deadly collision occurred.
The feds made clear where Amtrak's priorities stood. The federal agency that runs the nation's passenger rail lines was overly concerned with punctuality, and less so with safety.
The feds pointed to no less than 20 separate safety lapses.v
Two veteran Amtrak workers, Joe Carter, who was operating the backhoe, and Peter Adamovich, a supervisor, were killed.
There were seven crew members and 337 passengers on board the Amtrak train 89, which was zipping along on its trip from New York City to Savannah, Ga.
It's a bit of a miracle that more weren't killed or injured.
You can get all the details here.
Comments