Investigators seek answers in wreck
HOBOKEN, N.J. — Federal investigators are trying to determine what happened before a New Jersey commuter train barreled through a station and crashed into a barrier, causing a young mother to be killed by falling debris and injuring more than 100 others.
Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board will be looking to determine how fast the train was going when it crashed at the busy Hoboken station Thursday morning. They hope to speak to the train's injured engineer on Friday, NTSB Vice Chairman T. Bella Dinh-Zarr said. State officials say he has been cooperating.
The investigation will seek to answer many questions, including whether a system designed to prevent accidents by overriding the engineer and automatically slowing or stopping trains that are going too fast could have helped if it had been installed on the line.
Investigators recovered an event recorded from the locomotive Thursday night and will be examining it today, Dinh-Zarr said Friday morning on ABC's “Good Morning America.” The device contains information on the train's speed and braking.
More than 100,000 people use New Jersey Transit to commute from New Jersey to New York City each day. The NJ Transit portion of the Hoboken station remained closed on Friday, slowing the morning commute for those making connections there.
As investigators began their probe, the family of Fabiola Bittar de Kroon, the crash's sole fatality, was in mourning. De Kroon had recently moved to New Jersey from Brazil after her husband got a job with an international liquor company.
She had just dropped her toddler daughter off at day care before rushing to catch a train, according to day care director Karlos Magner.
“She was dropping off the daughter, I was closing up the stroller,” he recalled. “We had a good talk for like a minute. And she said she was in a rush.”
Shortly after, the NJ Transit train ran off the end of the track as it was pulling in around 8:45 a.m., smashing through a concrete-and-steel bumper. As it ground to a halt in the waiting area, it knocked out pillars, collapsing a section of the roof.
De Kroon was killed by debris, and 108 others were injured, mostly on the train, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said. Scores were hospitalized, some with serious injuries including broken bones.
The engineer, Thomas Gallagher, was pulled from the mangled first car and was treated at a hospital and released. Gallagher has worked for NJ Transit for 29 years, and a union roster shows he started as an engineer about 18 years ago.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said investigators will determine the cause.
Some witnesses said they didn't hear or feel the brakes being applied before the crash. Authorities would not estimate how fast the train was going. But the speed limit heading into the station is 10 mph.
“The train came in at much too high rate of speed, and the question is: 'Why is that?”' Christie said.
Trains like the one in Thursday's crash also are equipped with a system that sounds a loud alarm and eventually stops the train if the engineer goes 15 to 20 seconds without touching the controls.
But it was unclear whether those mechanisms kicked in or would have made a difference if they had.
