“Reports are that more than a half-dozen soldiers and other civilian medical personnel all assisted in the rescue. Many did not want to be interviewed. Many left quietly after the first responders arrived. These are the unsung heroes and patriots we have around us every day, and on this day, they made a huge difference.”
As the railway cars that catapulted off the tracks and onto the highway below are recovered, lights illuminate the eerie scene. Railway cars are not supposed to be on the road.
Amtrak’s president says the company is “profoundly sorry” after a train derailed a week before Christmas in Washington state and hurtled off an overpass onto a freeway, killing three people.
“We share everyone’s sense of urgency to identify exactly what caused this to happen, and we continue to fully cooperate with the investigation being led by the NTSB,” Richard Anderson said in a statement.
The Amtrak train was making its first-ever run along a faster new route. According to reports and data from the black box on the trailing engine, the train was traveling at just over 80 mph at the time of the derailment. The speed zone in that portion of the track was 30 mph.
Derailment Ahead
Second Lt. Robert McCoy, an evacuation platoon leader in the 62nd Medical Brigade, had just completed physical fitness training at Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM) and was headed home Monday morning.
“I was driving south on Interstate 5 Monday when I saw the train with 14 cars and engines about to cross the span over the freeway. There was a loud noise, and the bridge’s concrete abutments exploded. It fell off of the bridge and just kept coming and kept coming and kept coming,” McCoy said.
“I slammed on the brakes and pulled onto the shoulder.”
McCoy found about eight people, who had been ejected from the rail cars, lying on the freeway. Above the injured passengers a train car hung from the bridge, one end resting on another train car that sat flat on the freeway.
“My first concern was, if this falls it’s going to fall directly on these individuals,” McCoy said. McCoy relied on his training and went into triage mode and started moving the victims out of harm’s way in case the dangling car fell.
“Almost all of them were very dazed, really in a state of shock,” McCoy said.
As other drivers on the scene stopped and stared, many deciding just to take pictures and cell videos, Livingston parked his car and ran to the scene.
Seconds earlier, Major Michael Livingston had been headed south to Lacey with his teen daughter. Livingston, a nurse anesthetist, didn’t see the derailment but saw a cloud of smoke or steam rise, probably from a crushed automobile.
As other drivers on the scene stopped and stared, many deciding just to take pictures and cell videos, Livingston parked his car and ran to the scene.
He first checked on occupants of the cars and trucks that the train cars had hit. Livingston knocked on the locomotive’s door. A man inside indicated he was OK. Livingston then turned his attention to the dangling train car.
“We all had that idea, that the car was going to fall, and people were in it, and our priority was to get those people out of it,” Livingston said.
Just then he saw a man dressed in US Army physical fitness clothes begin climbing a semi-tractor trailer that was smashed against the level train car on the road. “I saw Lt. McCoy scale up the back of the semi-trailer like Spider-Man, so I thought I’ll get up the same way,” Livingston said.
Both men walked along the top of the level rail car to reach the end of the one that was dangling. That’s where they found a woman struggling to get her mother out of the rail car. The older woman’s lower body seemed to be pinned in by the wreckage.
While McCoy and Livingston were assisting the women, Lt. Col. Christopher Sloan, a deputy commander for administration, was on his way to work at JBLM when he spotted the disaster. A veteran of multiple deployments including two in Iraq, Sloan instantly knew he had driven into a mass casualty event.
“I stopped my car. I backed it up, and I ran because there were people who needed help,” Sloan said. “You could begin to see passengers exiting the rail car that was dangling off the bridge.” When Sloan got inside a derailed train car that was level on the road, he said it was unlike anything he had seen in a war zone. “The seats were everywhere; there was luggage everywhere. It was chaos,” Sloan said.
Just then he saw a man dressed in US Army physical fitness clothes begin climbing a semi-tractor trailer that was smashed against the level train car on the road.
Injured victims were trapped under the wreckage. Others, in a daze, were looking for lost cellphones and luggage. Train derailments were not something Sloan was familiar with, but his military training to deal with an emergency was, and it kicked in.
“They needed help, and they needed to be cared for,” Sloan said.
Following McCoy and Livingston’s example, Sloan climbed up the semi-trailer onto the top of the train. From there he climbed inside the car dangling off the bridge.
“That’s where I first met Maj. Livingston,” he said. “Seconds later, I found McCoy working to assist the injured.”
The woman whose mother they had been working to free told the men her husband and 8-month-old daughter were still trapped inside the car’s bathroom.
Livingston moved a mass of severed cables that had connected the two cars, and McCoy made his way into the car.
“He started banging the (bathroom) door so hard I thought he was going to break his kneecap,” Livingston said of McCoy. “But that door would not budge.”
The man inside the bathroom said he and his baby were OK. They would wait for firefighters to free them.
As the men moved further up the dark and inclined car, Livingston moved aside dislodged panels and luggage racks.
“You saw shoes everywhere, backpacks, cellphones. The car was also resting cockeyed. It was like a jungle in there,” Livingston said.
The soldiers used their cellphones as flashlights. They found dazed victims with broken limbs, head wounds, and other injuries.
“We got people over the seats and out the door,” Sloan said. “Some people were bringing their luggage. Others were very animated to get out of this situation. There was no level surface anywhere in the car.”
After a while, there were only two people left in the train car, one man with a broken arm and his wife who had a broken ankle.
“All we could see was her hip and a broken leg,” Sloan said. The woman was wedged under a seat. The man wouldn’t leave his wife.
“They weren’t going to depart each other’s sides,” Sloan said. With a concerted effort, the three soldiers lifted the seat off the woman.
“We pulled her out, inch by inch until we could get her to sit up,” Sloan said. “And then she took a breath and said, ‘I’m going to be OK, I’m going to be OK.”
Slowly they moved her down the steep car. She took breaks by resting on the soldiers’ legs.
Help Arrives
The soldiers had been working mainly alone since they started, but now help was arriving and firefighters had entered the car.
“First responders were on it, they were everywhere,” McCoy said.
The soldiers estimated they spent 90 minutes to two hours on the scene before firefighters sent them home. They had done all they could do.
“We took care of the people that needed to be taken care of,” Sloan said.
At the Hospital
Lt. Col. Scott Grogan, director of family medical residency at Madigan Army Medical Center, was having his daily huddle with his nursing staff, residents, and faculty Monday morning.
“Right in the middle of that the overhead page came,” he said.
“Code Triage,” the announcement said.
“Is this real?” Grogan and others asked each other, accustomed to frequent drills. “The next call a minute later was ‘All available gurneys to the emergency department.”
Madigan Army Medical Center is a level two trauma center that treats both military and civilian patients. It is located just seven miles from the scene of Monday’s derailment.
The way that we responded is just truly a reflection of the things that we’ve done in combat –Dr. Vance Sohn, director of general surgery, Madigan Army Medical Center
Col. Matthew Martin is chief of trauma and critical care at Madigan. On Monday morning, he was in an operating room, seconds away from opening a patient with his scalpel.
“The chief of anesthesia came in and said, ‘There’s been this train derailment, and we’re expecting 50 to 70 patients,’” Martin said.
The hospital went into combat mode. The emergency room, intensive care units, and surgery rooms were readied for a mass influx of patients, Martin said. The staff made plans on where the walking wounded would go.
Martin and others at Madigan, like Dr. Vance Sohn, are veterans of overseas deployments and mass casualty events.
“The way that we responded is just truly a reflection of the things that we’ve done in combat,” Sohn, director of general surgery, said.
19 patients arrived at Madigan. Others were sent to hospitals from Olympia to Tacoma.
Most of the injuries from Monday’s disaster were from blunt force trauma. They included broken limbs, head wounds, abdominal injuries, and cervical spine fractures, Martin said.
As of Tuesday the 19th, all of Madigan’s 12 patients who were admitted were in serious or better condition. “It was nothing short of a miracle,” nurse Emily Phillips said. “I was expecting way worse.”
Reports are that more than a half-dozen soldiers and other civilian medical personnel all assisted in the rescue. They just happened to be there at the right place and at the right time. Many did not want to be interviewed. Many left quietly after the first responders arrived. These are the unsung heroes and patriots we have around us every day, and on this day, they made a huge difference.
