Adamuz continues to chew on the tragedy of last Sunday’s train accident. The dead now total 41, of the possible victims who are still inside the mass of iron from the most destroyed carriages of the event, those of the Alvia 2384 train that was headed with 184 people to Huelva from Madrid. Rocío Flores, 30 years old, was traveling in the fourth car of this train, traveling at about 200 kilometers per hour, when at 7:45 p.m. she felt a great jolt. “We flew through the air,” says the woman. Another convoy, from the Iryo company with number 6189, with 294 passengers and at 210 kilometers per hour, had just derailed and three of its cars invaded the adjacent track, where the train where Flores was traveling was circulating at that same moment. A fatal accident that occurred near the Cordoba town of Adamuz (4,100 inhabitants) and has caused 152 injuries, of which 39 are hospitalized in various centers in the Andalusian community (13 of them in the Intensive Care Units).
Several work lanes have been opened from the center of the disaster. The first of them consists of the tasks of identifying the deceased and. Regarding the latter, according to official sources, there may be duplications. This Monday, the darkest of this January, both the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, and the president of the Junta de Andalucía, Juanma Moreno, appeared in a pavilion in Adamuz where they warned, among other issues, that the number of deaths may rise. “There are still some areas that are opaque after the firefighters check, beyond that you cannot continue without heavy machinery,” said Moreno.
To solve these obstacles, they are working this Tuesday to lift the wagons that overturned on the tracks and fell into a nearby embankment. One of these machines has the strength to lift up to 300 tons and the other, up to 400. This is how Rafael Marín, head of the Grúas Alhambra company, the Granada company that is in charge of lifting the wagons, details it from ground zero of the derailment. “We are going to work on all of them,” highlights Marín.
During the night, heavy machinery compacted the ground, as detailed by the Andalusian Emergency Agency, and the Iryo train cars were propped up. The body was recovered in one of the cars of this convoy, which this morning has raised the death toll to 41. Workers are fighting to recover three other bodies located, but they have not yet managed to reach them. The Civil Guard, in fact, is working with specialist dogs to search for remains and evidence to locate and identify all the victims.
Another of these lines of work is the investigation of the causes of the accident. The focus in this sense is on car 6 of the Iryo train, the car that derailed in the first place and caused the rear part of the convoy to invade the opposite track. The car, at the request of the Civil Guard, has not been lifted to continue taking samples. The train was checked last Thursday and the exact point on the tracks where the accident occurred, according to sources from the Ministry of Transport.
📺LIVE TV | Marlaska: “The catenary in the Alvia area is being cleaned so that heavy machinery can access it,” and the three bodies located can be “recovered. Let’s hope there are no more,” but he hopes to “remove any doubts about it.”
— EL PAÍS (@el_pais)
The Government has not yet opted for either of the two hypotheses on the table: that it was a problem with the track or a failure of the train. The Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, explained this Tuesday after the Council of Ministers that the investigation has just begun and the technicians at the moment do not opt for any of the options. “All hypotheses are open,” he explained.
The Minister of Transport, on the other hand, has disconnected the accident from the lack of investment in the railway network. In an interview in Puente He has indicated that the section where the accident occurred was renovated in May and has described it as “mere speculation” that the accident occurred due to a break in the track, although he has admitted that there are some, but that it cannot yet be confirmed whether they are the cause of the derailment or a consequence of it. “The issue is far from being resolved in less than 24 hours, the research technicians themselves say that they are in the initial phase, there is a lot of work ahead for conclusions, therefore, there is speculation,” he insisted.
The judicial investigation of the train accident will be directed by Judge Cristina Pastor Recover, recently appointed head of the Montoro Court of Section 2 Civil and Instruction, whose appointment was published today in the Official State Gazette and as confirmed by sources from the Superior Court of Justice of Andalusia. The agents of the Judicial Police Unit of the Civil Guard have already begun to take statements from several witnesses, as sources close to the investigations have confirmed to EL PAÍS. These include both travelers and convoy workers.
. A suffocating agony, in many cases, without answers as to where their loved one is. Nawal and her family spent it in a hotel, after spending the entire day within the walls of the Poniente Sur Civic Center in Córdoba where the victims’ relatives gather in search of information. “I fainted when they told me that there were no more injured people,” says Nawal, who still has no news of her sister Yamila, 45, who was in car number 8 of the .
The stories behind the number of deaths published by this newspaper are like punches that hit the mood. One of the hardest is that of the two rescue service professionals who were found during the night of the derailment. She was the only survivor of the five members of the Zamorano Álvarez family, who traveled in one of the first Alvia cars.
Her grandmother, desperate, was at the Huelva station, clinging to the hope that the rest of the family (the little girl’s parents, Félix and Cristina; her brother Pepe, 12, and her cousin, also Pepe) were still alive. But early this Monday, the hope of seeing them again faded when they told him that their bodies had appeared. Although the media have already counted twenty identified victims, the Institute of Legal Medicine of Córdoba (which has already received 37 bodies) has only performed autopsies on 23 and fully identified five.
The news this Monday caused a flurry of cancellations in the official agendas of politicians and public representatives. The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, suspended his attendance at the World Economic Forum in Davos (Switzerland) to be at the scene of the event, where he appeared alongside Puente and Moreno. “It is a day of pain for all of Spain.” “We are going to find the truth. With absolute transparency we will make it known to the citizens,” declared the head of the Executive.
The Kings came at 12:30 this Tuesday, to see first-hand the work, accompanied by Moreno, Puente and the first vice president of the Government and Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero. They are also scheduled to visit the Reina Sofía University Hospital in Córdoba to be next to the victims of the accident.
Alternative transport
The high-speed service between Madrid and Andalusia will take several weeks to return to normal. Minister Puente speaks of a possible “horizon” “around February 2.” To solve the problems of rail travel, Renfe has given the green light this Tuesday to an alternative transportation plan to speed up travel on the high-speed lines between Madrid and Andalusia (which includes a bus section between Villanueva de Córdoba and the city of Córdoba to avoid the site of the accident). The company has asked that only those who must travel “for strictly necessary reasons” take advantage of this plan.
The trips are as follows: departures from Madrid-Puerta de Atocha at 7:00, 11:00, 15:00 and 19:00 towards Seville. At 9:00, 13:00 and 17:00 to Malaga. Trains will leave from Seville at 6:03, 9:55, 14:01 and 18:03. While from Malaga they will depart at 7:55, 11:55 and 15:55.
Travelers may request a full refund of their original ticket and purchase a new one corresponding to the services included in the alternative plan or request an exchange with a refund of the difference. Renfe will enable a daily frequency by conventional route from Chamartín to Seville (at 7:00), to Cádiz (at 15:00) and Granada and Almería (at 16:25). From Andalusia, this will take place at 6.35 from Cádiz, at 8.31 from Almería and at 15.00 from Seville. At the same time, Renfe has reinforced the Medium Distance services of the Madrid–Extremadura–Seville line with 736 more seats.
In addition, the airline Iberia has scheduled, from this Tuesday until Friday, one more daily flight in each direction between Madrid and Seville and Madrid and Malaga, which will increase its capacity by 728 additional seats, 364 on each route, while Air Europa will offer 360 more seats per day between Madrid and Malaga, also until Friday.
The accident has caused a surge in new purchases of tickets with alternative routes, hotel reservations, among other services, which has promoted an increase in prices. The Sumar parliamentary group in Congress, in response to this issue, has written to the companies providing passenger transportation to ask them not to take advantage of the “urgent and painful” situation derived from the train accident in Adamuz, which has left communications partially cut off, to make money. “In contexts like this, the moral height and social responsibility of those companies that operate essential services are measured, especially when citizens are forced to depend on them,” the text highlights.
With information from: Eva Saiz, Javier F. Magariño, Nacho Sánchez, Elena Reina, Laura Llach, Óscar López-Fonseca, Javier Martín-Arroyo y Julio Nunez.
