The crash appears to have had more complicated causes than, say, a sleepy or incompetent engineer. In fact, the engineer has been questioned about the crash and has earned the respect of FBI investigators for being “extremely cooperative” according to the New York Times. And now it seems that the train may have been hit by something just before it derailed.
Investigators asked the engineer, Brandon Bostian, whether he recalled any projectiles, and he said he did not.
“He was specifically asked that question, and he did not recall anything of that sort,” Mr. Sumwalt said. “But then again, he reported that he does not have any recollection of anything past North Philadelphia.”
The assistant conductor, however, who was working in the cafe car, heard Mr. Bostian talking to an engineer on the Septa regional rail line who said his train had been “hit by a rock or shot at,” according to Mr. Sumwalt. She said she thought she heard Mr. Bostian reply that his train had also been struck. ...NYT
And then, in the next moment, the train left the tracks.
There have been enough injuries and deaths to put the potential law suits up there in the hundreds of millions. But Congress — in 1997, when Newt Gingrich was Speaker — capped the damages for train accident at $200,000,000.
With eight people killed and scores injured, the claims could easily exceed $200 million. Paul R. Kiesel, a lawyer who represented victims in the 2008 Metrolink crash in California, said the money would not go far enough to compensate victims whose lives will never be the same.
“The cap will without question come into play, and those who were injured will undoubtedly receive a fraction of their actual damages — economic, medical, lost wages and otherwise,” he said. …NYT
This certainly bears out Adam Gopnik’s contention that Republicans have little if any respect for basic services and protections provided by the federal government. Our “federal government” isn’t some alien organization that imposes its will on worthy, hard-working American families. Federal government is the agency we put in place to provide and secure services for all of us. The reason the far right dislikes it is the reason they are suspicious of anything that implies common interests, community, one-for-all beliefs.
This week’s tragedy also, perhaps, put a stop for a moment to the license for mocking those who use the train—mocking Amtrak’s northeast “corridor” was a standard subject not just for satire, which everyone deserves, but also for sneering, which no one does. For the prejudice against trains is not a prejudice against an élite but against a commonality. The late Tony Judt, who was hardly anyone’s idea of a leftist softy, devoted much of his last, heroic work, written in conditions of near-impossible personal suffering, to the subject of … trains: trains as symbols of the public good, trains as a triumph of the liberal imagination, trains as the “symbol and symptom of modernity,” and modernity at its best. “The railways were the necessary and natural accompaniment to the emergence of civil society,” he wrote. “They are a collective project for individual benefit … something that the market cannot accomplish, except, on its own account of itself, by happy inadvertence. … If we lose the railways we shall not just have lost a valuable practical asset. We shall have acknowledged that we have forgotten how to live collectively.” …Gopnik,NewYorker
Collectively? Collectively?? Sounds like communism, doesn’t it, Newt!