SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Twenty-seven people were injured Thursday night when two Sacramento Regional Transit light-rail trains collided, the Sacramento Bee reports. Thirteen of those were transported to area hospitals. Two of the injuries were described as moderate, and none were considered life-threatening.
The accident occurred in North Sacramento in an isolated area near Roseville Road, about a mile from where tracks cross under Interstate 80 and enter Sacramento’s city limits.
Transit officials told a local TV station that the injuries occurred on a southbound train which collided with a test train carrying three employees. None of the employees were hurt in the crash.
It is the second collision since Sacramento’s light-rail system began operating in 1987. In 1999, 30 people were injured when a train carrying passengers collided with a disabled train.
The good news, no one was seriously injured. The LA Times had this on their website 5 minutes after it happened. In the tradition of it bleeds it leads, the local TV stations in Sacramento had it on their 11pm news. Sacramento Fire had a news release at 11pm. The accident happened at 945pm. And the lawyers had their ads on the web starting at 1045pm(when I started seeing ads on a Google search).
As I’ve said before I’m just a worn out truck driver. If you need a lawyer in this just Google search the accident several law firms are advertising for clients. And (in my personal opinion) any competent lawyer will represent clients, in a case like this, without the injured having to put any money out.
In 30 years, tens of thousands of train movements safely carrying hundreds of thousands of riders. And two crashes in 30 years. I think that speaks pretty much for itself about a well run operation. Anyone who would even begin to intimate that there is some systematic failure or something amiss in the “safety culture” of the Sacramento Regional Transit organization is simply crazy. Engineers know that no system designed by and operated by humans can be 100 percent perfect and that perfection is mitigated by the necessity of cost and usability. Lawyers are the only educated people who argue that less than perfection is unacceptable regardless of cost or practicality.