The 1993 Alabama Train Crash
In 1993, tragedy struck what was meant to be a routine trip from Los Angeles to Miami. Amtrak's Sunset Limited, while crossing over the Big Bayou Canot, suddenly derailed, plunging much of the train into the water. To make matters worse, a fire near the engine made the other cars all but inaccessible. While many - around 180 - survived the disaster, there were 47 deaths and at least a hundred injuries. The catastrophe was the worst in Amtrak's history, and raised many questions about proper rail construction and safety measures.
The groundwork for the accident was set a few minutes before the disaster itself, when a towboat that had become disoriented in the fog pushed a barge it was leading into the bridge. The bridge, which had been designed with some flexibility to allow it to be converted into a swing bridge, was knocked out of alignment, badly bending the rails without fully breaking them. If they had broken, they would have set off a signal that might have allowed the driver of the train to prevent what came next.
Instead, at 3 AM, the driver hit the kinked section of the track at full speed, causing the derailment. The lead engine crashed into a fairly dry section of the bayou, its fuel tanks rupturing and causing the fire, while two of the passenger cars and many other cars that were thankfully without passengers crashed into the water. Passengers broke windows and swam out of flooding cars to escape, trying to save others but having difficulty due to the ongoing flame and their own injuries. Even some who escaped their car died due to smoke inhalation or related complications. Survivors reported later that the event was deeply disorienting, with many feeling it was something out of a film or a dream rather than something that was really happening.
Cleanup efforts that followed were grisly and depressing. Volunteers who came to try to rescue any trapped survivors instead found themselves bringing up corpses, some still frozen in the positions of terror they had died in. The event left the nearby town of Mobile paralyzed with grief as people did their best help and found that, in the majority of cases, those in the train were far beyond help.
In the aftermath, the accident was studied closely and the causes determined. Amtrak was chided for the weakness of the bridge and the fact that the track could bend that badly without breaking or sending a signal to any drivers. In addition, drivers of towboats were required to have radar systems, preventing catastrophes like that caused by the towboat driver's accidental crash. In the end, while no one person or thing was to blame, accident upon accident piled together into one of the worst disasters in the history of transport.