A horrific train accident in Philadelphia on Tuesday night has left five people dead, more than 50 others injured and six in a critical condition.
The train was travelling from Washington to NYC when it hit a curve and derailed. Six cars cars overturned and the engine was separated from the rest of the train; approximately 238 passengers and five crew were on board at the time.
Early reports are saying that passengers were climbing out of windows to get away – when firefighters arrived, they found two people trapped under the train.
Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter confirmed the deaths.
“It’s an absolute mess,” he said. “Never seen anything like it. The engine completely separated from the train and one of the cars is perpendicular to the rest of the cars.”
An Associated Press employee who was travelling at the back of the train, Paul Cheng, said the front “look[ed] pretty bad”.
“The front of the train is really mangled. It’s a complete wreck. The whole thing is like a pile of metal.”
Roads around the crash site are all blocked off, while all further Amtrak services have been cancelled for the rest of the night.
Former Pennsylvania Congressman Patrick Murphy was also on the train, and told a local station: “Obviously there was a lot of mayhem. People were pretty banged up. There was a lot of blood, a lot of bleeding. I pulled myself up. The guy who I kind of landed on was OK. The guy next to me to him was completely passed out, knocked unconscious.”
He tweeted these images earlier from the crash:
— Patrick J. Murphy (@PatrickMurphyPA) May 13, 2015
— Patrick J. Murphy (@PatrickMurphyPA) May 13, 2015
No cause for the derailment has yet been identified, but both the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Railroad Administration are dispatching teams to investigate further.
More to come.
Photo by Mark Makela via Getty.
