By Nina Lopez and Michael Francis Gore
ADAMUZ, Spain, Jan 19 (Reuters) – At least 39 people were killed in southern Spain after a high-speed train derailed and collided with an oncoming train late on Sunday in one of Europe’s worst rail accidents in 80 years.
The crash near Adamuz in Cordoba province, about 360 km (223 miles) south of Madrid, also injured 122 people, including 12 in intensive care, according to emergency services.
“The train overturned to one side… then everything went dark and all I heard were screams,” said Ana, a young woman who was returning to Madrid and being treated at a Red Cross center in Adamuz.
Limping and wrapped in a blanket, her face covered in plasters, she described how she was dragged from the train covered in blood by other passengers. Firefighters rescued her pregnant sister from the wreckage, and an ambulance took them both to hospital.
“There were people who were fine and people who were very, very badly hurt. You had them right in front of you and you knew they were going to die and there was nothing you could do,” she said.
REMOTE LOCATION COMPLICATES RESCUE
The rescue operation was complicated by the remote location of the accident in a hilly region with olive trees. It could only be accessed via a one-way road, making it difficult for ambulances to get in and out, Iñigo Vila, national director of emergencies at the Spanish Red Cross, told Reuters.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who canceled his trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and Transport Minister Oscar Puente were among those who headed to the crash site on Monday.
Police drone footage showed the trains coming to a halt 500 meters apart. One train car had been split in two, with one side crushed like a tin can.
Paqui, a resident of Adamuz who along with her husband rushed to help rescue the survivors, described seeing body parts along the paths between the two crash sites.
“(My husband) found a dead child inside, another child called his mother. You’re never prepared to see something like that,” she said.
There were around 400 passengers in the two trains, according to the statements of the two train operators, Iryo and Alvia, from Renfe.
Police said they had opened an office in Cordoba for relatives to provide DNA samples to help identify the dead.
The Iryo train, traveling at 110 km/h, was on its way from Malaga to Madrid when it derailed, Renfe president Álvaro Fernandez Heredia told Cadena Ser radio station.
Twenty seconds later, the second train, heading towards Huelva at 200 km/h, either collided with the last two carriages of the Iryo train or with debris from the line, he said. The Iryo train had lost a wheel which has not yet been located.
It was too early to talk about the cause, but it happened under “strange conditions,” Fernandez Heredia said, adding that human error was virtually ruled out.
Infrastructure problems on the line near Adamuz, from signaling failures to problems with overhead power lines, have caused high-speed train delays 10 times since 2022, according to a Reuters analysis of the X account of state rail infrastructure administrator Adif.
The death toll is the highest in a train accident in Spain since 2013, when a train derailed in the northwestern city of Santiago de Compostela and burst into flames, killing 80 people and injuring 145. It is among the top 20 deadliest in Europe over the past 80 years, according to Eurostat data.
Juan Barroso lost four family members and was desperately traveling from hospital to hospital and calling rail companies looking for answers.
He said his cousin and her six-year-old daughter had been recovered, but others, including his nephew, were still missing, he told state broadcaster RTVE.
PIENA RENOVATED LAST YEAR
The tragedy also evokes memories of the 2004 bombing of four trains heading to Madrid’s Atocha station, which killed nearly 200 people.
Spain has faced a series of national emergencies over the past 18 months, including fatal floods in Valencia, a major power outage and the worst fire season in three decades.
Puente said the Iryo train was less than four years old and the railway line near Adamuz was completely renovated last May with an investment of 700 million euros ($813.5 million). Iryo said the train was last inspected on January 15.
Spain’s high-speed rail network has 3,622 km of tracks, according to Adif, making it the largest in Europe and the second largest in the world after China.
Around 10 million people used the high-speed rail link between Madrid and Andalusia in 2024, according to the CNMC competition authority.
The government was criticized last year for a series of network delays caused by blackouts and the theft of copper cables from the lines.
Spain opened its high-speed rail network to private competition in 2020 in a bid to offer low-cost alternatives to Renfe Ave trains.
Iryo is a joint venture between Italian state rail operator Ferrovie dello Stato, airline Air Nostrum and Spanish infrastructure investment fund Globalvia. It started operating in November 2022.
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(Reporting by Nina Lopez, Michael Gore, Leonardo Benassatto, Susana Vera, Emma Pinedo and Victoria Waldersee; Additional reporting by Pietro Lombardi; Writing by Charlie Devereux; Editing by David Latona and Sharon Singleton)