The crash, which happened near the town of Urda in central Spain, followed another accident involving the same rail companies on the same line that killed 46 people in January
International News via Reuters:
Spain’s transport minister on Friday rejected calls for his resignation over the second train accident on his watch to cause mass casualties this year, as authorities worked to identify the victims from a crash that killed at least 69 people.
Lawmakers from across the political spectrum this week condemned Transport Minister Oscar Puente for attributing Wednesday’s crash to a break in protocol by control centre operators rather than accepting responsibility, with rail workers’ unions calling for his immediate dismissal.
The crash, which happened near the town of Urda in central Spain, followed another accident involving the same rail companies on the same line that killed 46 people in January.
It has reopened a debate about safety and maintenance on Spain’s high-speed rail network, the most extensive in Europe, as the country prepares for an election that left-leaning Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has called for November 29.
“My duty now is not to focus on discussing whether I will remain in office, but on solving the problem, determining exactly what happened and providing clear explanations,” Puente said at a press conference on Friday.
At the scene of the crash, large cranes were lifting the mangled wreckage as the Civil Guard listed 64 people as missing in what is already Spain’s deadliest train accident since 2013. It was unclear if all those missing were accounted for in the death toll.
Authorities have carried out 49 autopsies so far and formally identified five people, three women and two men, Esther Padilla, spokesperson for the Castilla-La Mancha regional government, said on state television network TVE.
AUTHORITIES CAN’T RULE OUT MORE FATALITIES
No additional bodies were found when rescue teams overturned a train carriage on Thursday, Castilla-La Mancha regional leader Emiliano Garcia-Page said on TVE.
Identifying the bodies was proving difficult because many were in pieces, he said. On Thursday, rescue teams had placed partial remains in 31 bags.
“We cannot rule out the possibility of more fatalities,” Garcia-Page said.
The collision occurred after several trains were automatically stopped due to the failure of a signalling system, after which the central control centre in Madrid took over. A train operated by state-owned Renfe was authorised to proceed, even though there was a stationary Iryo-operated train ahead, according to Puente.
Audio of communications between the control centre and the train drivers obtained by El Pais showed how a controller authorised the Renfe train to continue on its journey at a normal speed, which Puente said disregarded a protocol to travel at no more than 40 kph in such circumstances.
CONTROLLERS SAY FOCUS SHOULD BE ON FAILED SIGNAL SYSTEM
The debate about who was at fault intensified, with unions saying it was unfair to lay the blame on human error.
Raquel Ayllon, a union leader at state-owned infrastructure operator Adif, said controllers were having to operate under difficult working conditions.
“Human error is being criticized and questioned very quickly, while people are not really focusing on the central issue: the failure of the safety system,” Ayllon said on TVE.
Puente said the number of staff working at the control centre in Madrid had almost doubled since 2012 and that the controller who made the call had been working for two hours when the crash occurred.
“I have never used the term ‘human error’, although that is not to say that there was no human error,” he said.
He said the LZB train control system that failed on Wednesday had an average of 170 failures per year, which was about the same as the rest of Europe.
The system was behind schedule for an upgrade, public documents show.
The European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS) has been installed across most of Spanish high-speed rail, according to a factsheet by European rail association UNIFE, which developed the new standard.
Thales España, the Spanish arm of the French equipment maker, won a 2021 contract to install the ERTMS on the Madrid-Seville line, site of the two fatal crashes, by early 2026, but the work fell behind and passed to Hitachi Rail in 2024, according to Thales.
Thales declined to comment on the delay of the rollout.
Puente said the ERTMS system on the Madrid-Seville line was expected to begin working in early 2027, adding that the delay was due to the complexity of installing the system while keeping the line in operation.
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Reporting by Charlie Devereux, Mireia Merinao, Corina Pons, Emma Pinedo and David Latona; Editing by Sharon Singleton, Aidan Lewis and Xevi Fontdegloria
