00:00:06
in 1993 the amtrak railroad experienced the deadliest train crash in united states history
00:00:16
47 passengers and crew were killed 103 more were injured the cause of the accident was unclear
00:00:26
the clues to this mystery were etched in twisted steel and buried in the mud of an alabama bio
00:00:33
waiting for investigators to find them [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] amtrak sunset limited is the country's
00:01:10
only remaining transcontinental train the sunset limited has an interesting history kind of dates back to the
00:01:16
romantic time of train travel when it was very elegant and posh to travel by train
00:01:23
on september 20th 1993 trudy justin and her husband larry boarded the sunset limited in deming new mexico headed for
00:01:32
florida and i could sit there and look and talk to other people but the best part is going to the dining car we went
00:01:39
to the dining car three times a day and you just trot back there and they were really nice to you
00:01:45
[Music] after dinner trudy and larry returned to their seats to rest the train stopped briefly in new orleans
00:01:54
to fix a broken air conditioner by 2 30 a.m it was running about 33 minutes behind schedule
00:02:02
it stopped in mobile alabama where the engineer waited until a freight train cleared the bridge up ahead
00:02:10
then the sunset limited started on the last leg of its trip 750 miles to miami the train throttled up to a cruising
00:02:20
speed of 72 miles an hour but visibility was hindered by fog shortly before 3 am the sunset limited
00:02:29
approached the bayou cannot bridge in a matter of seconds the train's three engines and next four
00:02:37
cars plummeted into the water the engine's fuel tanks ruptured igniting the diesel fuel
00:02:46
then the people start yelling we got to get out of here because this is going to
00:02:52
explode the tugboat marvella was the first to report the accident i believe we're right below the train
00:03:01
here's a hell of a fire in the middle of the river ain't supposed to be no fire
00:03:03
behind like they don't know exactly where we at is so far again i can't tell
00:03:06
she's never looking on radar so there's something bad wrong up here it was
00:03:12
a hell on earth kind of an environment it was just a horrific horrific sight trudy grabbed her husband larry
00:03:20
and swam for sure the fire just was getting bigger you see nothing i heard people
00:03:28
saying oh we're gonna die we're gonna die and i heard the lord's prayer
00:03:33
the movilla headed towards the flames through the dense fog to investigate i didn't know where the boat came from
00:03:41
we had no idea all we know is the spotlight's on us and of course we could see that it was you could hear it
00:03:49
the crew pulled 17 passengers from the water others were less fortunate the parents
00:03:55
of a little girl she was 10 years old and handicapped they pushed her to the arms of a rescuer through a window
00:04:02
on their car and they didn't make it out [Music] of the 220 passengers and crew on board
00:04:11
47 people were dead or unaccounted for the fbi immediately flew to the crash site to
00:04:20
investigate the possibility of terrorism the coast guard and the national transportation safety board also sent
00:04:27
investigators the lead locomotive was found buried in the mud at about a 45 degree
00:04:34
angle and three quarters of it you could not see it just buried itself into the marsh
00:04:40
a second engine was alongside a third was on the opposite side of the bridge four derailed cars were nearby
00:04:52
as a local salvage crew began the grim task of pulling the dead from the bayou investigators wanted to know
00:05:00
what caused the deadliest accident in amtrak history in the early hours of september 22 1993
00:05:14
amtrak sunset limited plummeted off the bayou cannot bridge in alabama killing 42 passengers and five crew members
00:05:25
ten minutes before the sunset limited derailed a freight train crossed the bridge in
00:05:30
the opposite direction without incident [Music] so what happened in those 10 minutes
00:05:41
divers recovered the trains event recorder from the bayou which is like an airlines flight data recorder
00:05:48
the tape revealed the train was traveling at 72 miles per hour and there was no brake application
00:05:56
whatever caused the crash the engineer never saw it investigators also discovered the
00:06:04
signals on the track were green the signals are controlled by a current that goes through the rail
00:06:13
and if the rail breaks the signal will immediately turn red so the signal didn't turn red
00:06:20
the bridge was originally built in three sections the southern section was a 165-foot
00:06:27
steel truss bridge the center section a single 140-foot steel girder was originally designed to
00:06:35
pivot so river traffic could pass through the northern section was simply 192 feet of track laid on top of a
00:06:43
wooden trestle the center section was totally destroyed despite its design the swing feature of the bridge was
00:06:55
never used and investigators discovered it wasn't connected properly since they never did use it as a swing
00:07:04
bridge they never did put in the same amount of tie downs at the ends of the bridge to hold it in place
00:07:15
divers also examined the wood pilings that supported the bridge we wanted to determine if the
00:07:22
piles had undergone any kind of deterioration such as damage from wood destroying organisms
00:07:31
like soft rod or brown rod decay under a powerful microscope scientists examined the cell walls of
00:07:40
the samples they look for triangular shaped microorganisms like these which would
00:07:46
indicate rot since we didn't find them present then we were fairly comfortable that
00:07:52
there was no appreciable deterioration of the piles contributing to the collapse
00:07:59
all that remained were three concrete piers when investigators looked more closely
00:08:06
they discovered that the steel plates used to connect the bridge to the concrete were displaced 48 inches out of
00:08:14
alignment corley also examined the bolts that attached the metal plates to the concrete
00:08:22
those attachments were poorly maintained in several cases the holes that were supposed to have
00:08:29
bolts through them didn't have anything recognizable in them when we took the material out
00:08:35
that was in those holes we found that it was rust when the sunset limited was pulled out of the water of bayou cannot
00:08:43
with sections of the bridge it was evident that something terrible had happened investigators found
00:08:52
that one of its sides a metal girder had been sheared off as if struck on the end
00:08:58
by a powerful force carly measured the spacing of the girders rivets and compared them to scratches along the
00:09:08
side of the train's engine the rivets made lines down the side of the engine and
00:09:15
you could match the lines made by those rivets with the bridge and confirm that that was what destroyed the girder on
00:09:24
the bridge but how did the train hit the outside of the bridge while structural engineers examined all
00:09:34
the evidence coast guard investigators began interviewing eyewitnesses what they were about to learn
00:09:43
would provide a surprising lead to the investigation [Applause] investigators had many questions but few
00:09:54
answers to what caused the crash of amtrak sunset limited coast guard investigators also
00:10:02
interviewed the men and women who helped in the rescue my first stop was actually to interview
00:10:09
the crew of the tugboat moth villa and that was because they were the reporting party of the accident
00:10:16
on the night of the crash the marvello was making a routine run up the mobile river pushing a load of coal
00:10:23
and pig iron the movilla was pushing six barges so the pilot was 400 feet away from the
00:10:31
front of the barges investigators learned that the pilot willie odom called the coast guard three
00:10:39
hours before the train crashed to report thick fog on the mobile river about a half hour before the accident
00:10:48
odom said he steered his six barges around a bend in the mobile river and saw what appeared to be
00:10:55
another tugboat on his radar he said he steered towards it hoping to tie onto it until visibility improved
00:11:05
but before that could happen willie odom said his tugboat ran aground at this point captain andrew stabler
00:11:14
took over command of the marvella and called the coast guard asking for help seems to have a cable or something
00:11:21
wrapped in the wheel barges will float a drift southbound and if anybody down there can help round them up i would
00:11:27
definitely appreciate it around 2 50 a.m the marvelous crew heard a crash then saw a fire through the fog
00:11:39
i'm not sure what i'm seeing but i'm seeing something that's burning and it
00:11:42
looks like it's crossways of the river i got out that far if that's what i'm looking at i don't
00:11:47
have any idea but if the marvello was on the mobile river how were they able to see an accident on
00:11:55
the bayou cannot six miles away but that was a mistake the accident was on the bridge going
00:12:10
across the bayou cannot a waterway that was closed to commercial boat traffic bayou cannot is a
00:12:19
subsidiary of the mobile river and in that very dense fog the operator of the tug mistakenly turned down into
00:12:28
bayou cannot thinking it was a bend in the river a couple of miles further up river than where he really was
00:12:35
but how could this happen investigators discovered that the movilla had no maps on board or even a
00:12:43
compass that's a very important thing but the people in the river don't look at it
00:12:48
that way so what all you do is steer between the banks and that's it the movilla was equipped with radar
00:12:56
which wasn't required at the time but the pilot willie odom wasn't trained to
00:13:01
use it the conclusion he didn't know anything about the radar you could turn it on you
00:13:07
could look at it tell you the picture on everybody didn't know anything about
00:13:10
the function of the radar when investigators heard odom's story they went back to the bridge to examine
00:13:18
what now seemed like a key piece of evidence the railroad bridge had a concrete pier
00:13:25
that was holding up the bridge structure and there was very fresh damage to the concrete of that bridge pier
00:13:35
something had hit the point of the pier was it one of the marvellous barges had the marvella caused the sunset
00:13:43
limited to derail when we found the left-hand barge there was a similar mark of scrape paint and an indentation
00:13:54
into the middle in fact it kind of looked t-shaped which would indicate that the barge hit the
00:14:01
top or flat portion as well as the edge of it and it kind of gave it a little t-shaped mark
00:14:08
the other barges revealed more surprising clues the center barge also had damage there
00:14:15
were vertical scrapes and an indentation a clue to the cause of the scrapes was found on the bridge's center span
00:14:25
when we pulled the girder out of the water we did a visual inspection and we noticed that some of the vertical steel
00:14:33
members called stiffeners that were on the side of the girder had been bent flat against the girder
00:14:41
investigators measured the distance between the stiffeners and compared them to the
00:14:46
vertical marks on the barge they were a perfect match now they had solid evidence to prove what
00:14:57
caused the fatal crash of the sunset limited authorities knew that the tugboat movilla was in the vicinity of the bayou
00:15:10
cannot bridge shortly before the train crash and not on the mobile river as the pilot thought
00:15:18
investigators discovered concrete chips on the movilla's front left barge the chips along with samples from the
00:15:27
bridge's pier were sent to the fbi for analysis each mix of concrete is unique it has a
00:15:34
specific amount of rocks sand cement and water the investigators cut the concrete
00:15:43
samples into razor thin slices then studied them under a transmitter light microscope
00:15:50
the microscope shines polarized light through the samples revealing the specific optical properties of the rocks
00:15:58
sand and cement the fbi after they examined the samples they found on the barge determined that
00:16:07
the concrete on the barge was the same as that found in the pier at the south end of
00:16:14
the bridge based on all the evidence the national transportation safety board concluded that willie odom had gotten
00:16:23
lost in the heavy fog as he piloted the marvella up the mobile river with no maps or compass on board
00:16:32
odom wasn't trained to read the boat's radar he mistakenly veered left onto the bio
00:16:40
cannot instead of continuing up the mobile river odom then mistook the radar image of the bridge
00:16:49
for another tow barge as he tried to maneuver towards it his front left barge struck the concrete
00:16:56
south pier the other two barges struck the bridge itself knocking the bridge and the train
00:17:02
track 48 inches out of alignment when odom struck the bridge he didn't know it in part because he
00:17:11
couldn't see the bridge through the fog since it was unlighted odom mistakenly believed
00:17:18
he had run aground inexplicably the collision bent the track in an s shape but didn't break it which explains
00:17:28
why the electrical current running through the tracks didn't break either had the track been severed sure that
00:17:35
signal would have gone off down the line and would have been a warning in mobile
00:17:38
that something was wrong at the track over by you counter coast guard records showed the movilla
00:17:44
struck the bridge only eight minutes before the sunset limited arrived as the engineer headed towards the
00:17:52
bridge he saw a green light telling him the track ahead was all clear as the train approached i believe that
00:18:00
the engine derailed just as it was getting to the portion of the bridge that had been
00:18:06
moved sideways and it hit that portion of the bridge dragging the entire bridge along with
00:18:14
the engines and destroying it it's a big piece of steel out on the bridge and the train struck it at 72 miles an
00:18:22
hour and then from that you can tell that it just tore the hell out of it as the track collapsed the lead engine
00:18:31
and the next four cars flew into the water some of the passenger cars stopped on
00:18:38
the bridge or the fatality count might have been higher tragically the train was running about a half hour
00:18:46
late due to the stop to repair the air conditioning had the train been on time it would have crossed the bridge
00:18:55
before the movilla ran into it i think this investigation just confirmed for me a couple of
00:19:02
long-standing philosophies that i've had one is that every accident is a kind of a chain reaction there's
00:19:10
five or six links in the chain that all have to happen in order for an accident to happen
00:19:17
they never did put in the same amount of tie-downs at the ends of the bridge to hold it in place
00:19:27
therefore it wasn't as resistant to a barge hitting it as it would have been
00:19:32
if they had tied it down at the ends better people cause accidents and that was clearly the case here
00:19:42
the lord is my shepherd therefore can i lack nothing he feeds me in a green pasture and
00:19:48
leaves me beside the waters a year after the accident survivors gathered to remember those who
00:19:59
lost their lives by then new regulations were in place to prevent similar accidents
00:20:08
tug boats are now required to have radar on board and all operators are required
00:20:13
to have formal training and how to use it the boats are also required to have a compass on board as well as the
00:20:21
necessary maps and river charts [Music] if the marvella had only had a compass on board
00:20:29
this accident might never have happened had there been a compass willy oda might have realized he was
00:20:36
making a left turn and not gone down the the wrong channel into bayou cannot there's also a requirement for all
00:20:45
bridges to have lighting even those on waterways closed to commercial traffic willie odom was cleared of any criminal
00:20:54
charges but he never again piloted a tugboat i think my main interest in all of the jobs i get into is to
00:21:05
determine what went wrong so that we can learn from the bad things that have happened in the
00:21:13
past and do better in the future i can't prevent what's happened but if i
00:21:20
learn lessons from it and then make changes in rules regulations and procedures i've done a lot to prevent
00:21:27
that next one from happening [Music]