At 2:48 a.m. on September 22, 1993, Amtrak's Sunset Limited train crossed Bayou Sara while a majority of its 220 passengers and crew members slept, unaware that in just a few short minutes they would witness the worst disaster in Amtrak's history to date.
Fog was thick over the water below as the 11-car train started its trek across Big Bayou Canot at 2:50 a.m. About one-third of the way across the bridge, passengers and crew members were suddenly woken as more than half the train plunged into the murky waters below.
Fuel tanks ruptured and flames leapt into the air, patches of fire springing up on the water where the fuel floated. Panicked passengers swam toward the shore, many drenched in still more fuel. Screams filled the air as other passengers reached the surface of the water, some no longer living.
It would be three days before officials could recover the 47 men, women and children killed of drowning, fire or smoke inhalation. More than 100 passengers were injured.
"It's not something we talk about all the time," said Steve Huffman, spokesman for the Mobile Fire-Rescue Department, "(but) it never goes away -- especially when September rolls around."
Huffman was in his third year as MFRD spokesman when the towboat MV Mauvilla hit the bridge over Big Bayou Canot, displacing one of the bridge's support beams by approximately 38 inches -- enough to cause the derailment.
He viewed the wreckage from a U.S. Coast Guard boat as personnel on the Department's fireboat, the Ramona Doyle, worked to clear the wreckage. The Ramona Doyle stayed at the accident site for three days with crews swapping out occasionally for rest.
Fire crews cleaned each of the seven rail cars recovered from the water with fire hoses as divers with the Daphne Fire Department, Marine Corps Reconnaissance and other agencies worked with volunteers to recover bodies in water so murky they "couldn't see their hands in front of their faces," Huffman said.
"It was hard to fathom how that had happened," Huffman said. "As much as you hate to say it, it was people who survived and people who died. There was no in-between."
After the accident was cleared the whole department, including secretaries who fielded calls about the crash, underwent critical incident stress debriefing to help cope and recover from the grim scene at Big Bayou Canot.
One MFRD employee quit after the accident, citing stress from the Sunset Limited wreck.
"Some had more difficulty dealing with it than others," Huffman said. "He said he just couldn't deal with it."
Several months before the disaster MFRD had participated in a multi-agency drill, involving approximately 30 agencies, to deal with a simulated plane crash in the Mobile River, Huffman said.
The drill got agencies, which were typically on separate radio frequencies, speaking with one another and helped identify issues with communication.
Those issues hadn't been resolved by the time the Sunset Limited hit the water, affecting agencies' emergency response time.
"We lacked the ability to communicate with each other," Huffman said. "We are just now on a system where we can all communicate with each other... That's why we switched radio systems (in January)."
The Department has since added a fleet of at least four smaller boats to respond to similar disasters. They've also created mass causality trailers to carry large amounts of bandages and other necessary first aid equipment in case of a disaster.
"We have a lot of equipment now that we didn't have back then," Huffman said.
He said emergency responders have not had to use the mass casualty trailers yet, although they were on hand when the Carnival Triumph came to town in February, in case passengers were injured in the journey to land.
Sunday 22 September 2013
http://blog.al.com/live/2013/09/20_years_later_memories_of_the.html
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