Bodies tossed hundreds of yards from the wreckage. Passengers climbing out of the windows of overturned carriages. Residents loading blood-soaked survivors into cars that served as makeshift ambulances.
Survivors and emergency crews were shaken on Monday, the day after a high-speed train crash that killed at least 39 people and injured scores more in southern Spain, describing scenes of chaos but also a disturbing stillness in carriages where no one was moving.
“People were trying to get out of the train, there were many injured,” Rafael Ángel Moreno, the mayor of Adamuz, where the accident took place, said.
He recounted in an interview how he and a local police officer were among the first people to reach the crash site on Sunday evening. It was “a terrible scene,” he said, his voice quavering. “We are continuing to work to recover the last bodies.”
Juanma Moreno, the regional president, said that DNA analysis was being used to identify some of the bodies.
“The impact was so severe that we have found bodies hundreds of meters from the impact,” he said.
“Some of the dead are difficult to recognize,” he added. “The impact was very strong, very strong.”
The sound of the crash startled people within earshot.
Andres Pastor Valverde, 53, a metalworker who lives nearby, was watching his son’s soccer game when he heard the crash, followed by a stream of sirens and alarms. When he saw on the news what had happened, Mr. Valverde rushed to the scene with his son, bringing blankets and a generator to help emergency workers see through the dark.
Gonzalo Sánchez Aguilar, 46, happened to be driving near the crash site and went to help. As he loaded injured survivors into his car to rush them to a hospital, he said in an interview, “I saw a lot of dead bodies. “Really bad injuries.”
As the day wore on, and Spanish leaders cleared their calendars to head to the scene, names of those killed began to emerge. Spain was riveted by the testimonies of survivors on television, radio and social media. Video shared by Spain’s civil guard showed emergency workers trying to break the glass of one of the train cars.
It was like “an earthquake,” said Salvador Jiménez, a journalist with Spain’s public broadcaster RTVE, who was traveling in the first car of the train that derailed while traveling on the line from Málaga, on Spain’s southern coast, to Madrid, the capital.
He said he felt the train had hit an animal or other obstruction on the track and the lights went out. A voice on the public-address system asked medical staff to go to car No. 5. The passengers, he said, broke windows with emergency hammers to get out.
Outside, he said, he saw the last cars completely overturned and people were pulling passengers out through windows that were facing the sky.
“Many people were shouting the names of passengers,” he said. Emergency workers, he said, asked passengers for their belts, perhaps to pull others out.
He said that they trudged through the dark to safety, where they were given blankets, sandwiches and milk. Iryo, the private company that operated the Madrid-bound train, later arranged buses to take survivors to Madrid, he said.
Amelia Nierenberg contributed reporting.
Jason Horowitz is the Madrid bureau chief for The Times, covering Spain, Portugal and the way people live throughout Europe.
The post ‘An Earthquake’: Survivors Describe High-Speed Train Crash in Spain appeared first on New York Times.
