Josimar Medina woke up shortly before 9 a.m. Wednesday to find himself airborne and rushing into his car to board the fast train from Madrid to Seville.
“I remember flying through the air and looking for my girlfriend, who was also shooting through the air,” said Medina, a 37-year-old tourist from Chiclayo, a city in northern Peru.
Once he landed, he looked around and realized how lucky he and his girlfriend, Vitoria Maia, had been.
“I saw people with cuts, people covered in blood, people without limbs, and I saw one person who had nothing left under their chest,” Medina said. “I saw people with crushed heads and people with mutilated arms. »
The Peruvian recounted details of Wednesday’s deadly train crash, in which at least 68 people were killed and dozens more injured, wearing a light brown T-shirt stained with the blood of a young American he had helped bring to safety.
Medina and Maia were in the seventh car of the public Renfe train which crashed into the rear of a train from the private company Iryo on the same line linking the capital to southern Spain. If they had been further forward, they could very well have been among the victims of the accident.
The couple got off the train and helped the injured while waiting for doctors and Guardia Civil agents to arrive at the scene of the accident, which occurred among vineyards and olive groves, near the small town of Urda, in the central region of Castile-La Mancha, near the city of Toledo.
Within hours of the accident, Urda had been transformed into a frantic emergency response center, with a local sports center pressed into service as a triage station for the walking wounded. Cars, vans and trucks from emergency services in Castile-La Mancha and neighboring Madrid filled the streets.
Fredrich and Arabella Barilea, a Filipino couple who now live in Dubai, were on the Iryo train, and Fredrich was thrown into the air from the impact.
“One guy was shouting, ‘Get out! Get out! Another train could hit!” said Frédéric. “We saw that all the people were getting off as well. Many of them had head injuries and were covered in blood. We got as far away from the train as possible.”
Eventually, buses arrived to transport the lightly injured survivors to Urda – although the Barileas said they were too shocked and confused to know exactly where they had been taken.
“It all happened in a split second,” Arabella said. “The table we were sitting at disappeared in the accident. I feel like we are in our second life. You never know what could happen. We are very grateful.”
Around the couple, people lined up patiently in the street waiting to board the coaches. Dressed in torn and bloodstained clothing and, in some cases, with bandages on their heads, they stared, mute and incomprehensible. Spain may have been in mourning, as Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said during his visit to Urda, but many of those lucky enough to survive the second major train accident in less than a year were still too deeply shocked to start crying.
Ata Yelkaya, a young Turkish tourist, usually takes the bus when traveling in Spain. By Wednesday, however, he had decided to try Iryo. Asleep and assuming his train had stopped at a station, he had turned off his tablet and pulled up his hood in anticipation of a nap. At 8:53 a.m., he felt that what he would later learn was the impact of the Renfe train hitting the carriages behind him.
“I woke up with a bump and my head hit the seat in front of me,” he said. “I looked at an elderly couple near me and saw the woman had a cut on her eyebrow. That’s when I knew something bad had happened.”
When he looked out the window, he saw that the cars behind his – Car No. 5 – had derailed and many people had been killed or injured.
“Everyone was in shock but I tried to help other people off the train,” he said. “I’m from Turkey and experienced the 2023 earthquake there, so I stayed calm and tried to think about what I should do and how to get out. It wasn’t until I went out and saw dead people that it hit me. I think everyone was in shock; too shocked even to panic or scream.”
Wednesday’s disaster revives memories of the Adamuz train accident in January, in which 46 people died. Once again, a small town found itself at the center of a national disaster, and once again local people rallied to bring food and water to a hall that had been set up as a center for those searching for their loved ones.
But, as also happened in Adamuz, the solidarity and kindness shown is likely to turn to anger in the coming hours as people seek answers about how one of Europe’s most modern and extensive high-speed rail networks could experience two deadly collisions that claimed the lives of at least 114 people in the space of just 10 months. With a snap general election just months away, many voters could use their vote to express their fury over another rail disaster. The “inexplicable circumstances” that led to the accident – as the Spanish transport minister called them – will need to be explained as quickly and completely as possible.
For all the rush to action and unity on display, there was also a sickening sense of déjà vu. A woman from Urda, who had spent the morning driving people into town from the scene of the accident, had few words to describe what she had seen and heard.
“Best sans verlo“, she said – “it’s better not to see something like that”. Again.
Gn world
