URDA, Spain — Spain’s second high-speed rail disaster this year, in which one train struck another from behind, killing 69 people, has raised fresh concerns about the safety of the country’s rail network ahead of a national election.
Search teams with sniffer dogs continued to look for victims on Thursday morning, a day after the collision in central Spain. Cranes helped shift the carriages as police and soldiers helped pick through the wreckage strewn down the gravel slope where at least three train carriages were tossed by the impact.
One more body was found overnight, taking the death toll to 69, according to the regional leader of Castilla La Mancha, Emiliano Garcia-Page. He added that 50 people remained hospitalized, while officials worked with family members to identify the dead.
“As a society, we have once again suffered a devastating blow, and we must adopt measures so that this doesn’t happen again,” Spain’s King Felipe VI said after visiting injured passengers at a hospital in Toledo.
Spain’s government declared three days of mourning starting Thursday. A minute of silence was held at various points at noon, including with lawmakers outside the Parliament and by rail workers and union leaders in Madrid’s main train station.
Testimonies of survivors filled Spanish television for a second day. Pablo Lopez, who was on the train that was hit from behind, recounted the moment of impact and the horrific aftermath to state broadcaster TVE.
“The image I have in my head is of a person crawling on the ground after being shot out of the other train,” he said.
A second blow to Spain’s touted high-speed rail
The high-speed rail network has been considered one of Spain’s crowning achievements. It is the world’s second-largest, after China’s. Until this year, it had not experienced a deadly crash since coming into service over three decades ago.
The reputation of the Spanish railways was already tarnished when in January 46 people died after one train jumped the track and slammed into the side of another going the opposite way in southern Spain.
Then, just nine months later, came the collision Wednesday morning that turned a sleepy stretch of rail lined by olive groves near the village of Urda into a scene of carnage.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez pledged an investigation and improvements to restore trust in a rail system that carried 45 million travellers last year, including millions of tourists.
“It is clear that we need to reinforce the safety of our train service to rebuild the trust in our high-speed rail,” Sanchez said Wednesday. “It is not acceptable for a country like Spain to endure two high-speed train accidents in the same year.”
Sanchez called the crash a “tragedy” when he visited the crash site a second time on Thursday, promising the victims and their families that the state would be with them.
Both deadly crashes this year took place on the same rail line between Madrid and Seville, the first of Spain’s high-speed network that opened in 1992. Each collision involved a train operated by state-owned RENFE and another operated by privately owned IRYO. Spain liberalized its high-speed rail service in 2021, with the Italian IRYO starting service the following year.
Political implications for Sánchez ahead of election
Sanchez had hoped to leverage a wave of discontent over housing costs and high rents when he called for early elections on Nov. 29.
He now faces questions about the safety of the railways, along with criticism from right-wing parties of his liberal migration policies and accusations of corruption against his party and his wife, which both he and his wife deny.
Sanchez’s main rival, conservative Popular Party leader Alberto Nunez Feijoo, demanded a full investigation of the crash.
Alejandro Quiroga, professor of political science at Madrid’s Complutense University, told The Associated Press that it is too early to tell if the crash will change the minds of many voters.
“This is not good news for the Socialist Party, but it may not hurt them very much because Spaniards generally don’t like it when politicians try to take advantage of tragedies,” Quiroga said. “That could be changing, but up until now it is not seen positively.”
Government says human error caused the crash
Spain’s Transport Minister Óscar Puente said Wednesday that the crash was caused by what he called the “inexplicable” order from a central command center for Spain’s trains after a security system had failed.
Puente said that at 8:30 a.m. the security system on a stretch of track stopped working due to a computer malfunction, causing all trains on that stretch to stop. At that point the IRYO train was stopped, with the RENFE train 25 kilometres (15.5 miles) behind.
But minutes later the central command told the RENFE train to start running again without any speed restrictions, and it ended up colliding with the stationary IRYO train at 8:53 a.m.
Spanish media on Thursday reproduced short audio clips of the controller ordering the train engineer to start moving.
Puente said that the train should never have been told to start moving again since a “stop signal” was still active on that line. And if it had, at least it should have been told to go at reduced speed.
Unions question minister
Train workers held a strike on Thursday that had already been planned before the Urda crash to demand the government carry out safety improvements to the rail services that unions say were promised after the first deadly collision in January.
Union leaders questioned the minister putting all the blame on one controller and criticized the leaking of the control room’s conversations to the media.
“The focus should not be on if there was a human error, but rather what is wrong with the system, what situations must be improved so that if there is a human error we don’t find ourselves in this situation,” said Pepa Paez of the CCOO union.
A judge also declared the crash site an investigation zone.
Meanwhile, thousands of travellers were left searching for alternative transport with the high-speed line connecting Madrid and Seville shut down.
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Joseph Wilson and Iain Sullivan, The Associated Press
Wilson reported from Barcelona, Spain. Associated Press writer Teresa Medrano in Madrid contributed to this report.
