Two dead in Washington rush-hour metro crash
Posted: 23 June 2009 0545 hrs

	Photos  of

WASHINGTON: Two subway trains slammed into each other Monday killing two people, injuring several more and leaving passengers trapped as one train was thrust on top of the other during Washington's evening rush hour, officials said.

Television images showed at least two carriages of one train had been lifted off the ground and had mounted the other train, partially crushing at least one carriage below on an above-ground section of the line in northeast Washington.

"We have two confirmed fatalities," communications official Carlotta Tyler told AFP, adding "there have been some serious injuries."

A Metro official confirmed that one of the dead was a driver of one of the trains, but she did not release the victim's name.

NBC television's local affiliate said there were reports of more than 100 injuries, as it showed live images of emergency responders helping injured passengers down the train tracks.

The collision occurred at 5:00 pm (2100 GMT) near the Fort Totten Metro station close to the District of Columbia's borderline with the state of Maryland. If was not immediately clear if it had been a head-on collision.

"A six-car Red Line train... was involved in a collision with another train at 5:00 pm today," the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) said in a statement.

Washington Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department spokesman Alan Etter told a local ABC television news station the incident was "developing into a mass casualty event".

Emergency workers were seen battling to lever up the raised carriages and using equipment to cut through the carriages' outer shell to get to where commuters were believed to be trapped inside.

Dozens of stunned passengers, safely evacuated from the train, were standing by the train tracks close to the collision site, or were being helped down off the other carriages by rescue workers. Some were limping and were clearly hurt.

For passenger Abra Jeffers, the crash was a harrowing welcome to the nation's capital, where he was heading home from his first day of work Monday.

"I was on the train that got hit. I thought it was an explosion," Jeffers, 25, told AFP. "I thought it was like the train bombings in London. There was smoke and dust everywhere."

Train passenger Jody Wickett told CNN she believed it was a head-on collision that sent her hurdling through the air of the subway car.

"We felt like we hit a bump and about five or 10 seconds later, the train just came to a complete halt and we went flying," Wickett said.

"I went in there to try and help and (there was) debris and people pinned under and in between the two cars. We were just trying to get them out and help them as much as possible, pulling back the metal and whatnot," she said.

"Some we couldn't, some we could, until an emergency crew got there."

Metro carries an average of some 800,000 people a day in and out of the nation's capital, and is divided into five lines criss-crossing the city and traveling deep into the neighboring states of Maryland and Virginia.

On the January 20 inauguration of President Barack Obama, more than 1.5 million people used Washington's public transportation system to see the swearing-in.

But many Metro officials have been urgently calling for more funds to repair the aging system, warning the system was coming under increasing strain.

On Monday, trains were being turned back at Brookland, Takoma, Rhode Island Avenue and Silver Spring stations "due to a train experiencing mechanical difficulties outside of Fort Totten station," WMATA said earlier.

Metro officials warned of huge delays to commuter traffic.

The last major train crash in the United States was in September, when 25 people were killed when the conductor of a train in Los Angeles was sending text messages on his mobile phone while in charge of a commuter train.

The deadly collision in Chatsworth, north of Los Angeles, also injured 134 people and was the worst train accident in the United States in some 15 years.

- AFP/yt