Some observers are speculating that yesterday’s horrific train derailment in Spain — which killed at least eighty people and injured upwards of a hundred others — may have been sabotage. The proximity of the disaster to the Santiago de Compostela festival and the association with Matamoros have fuelled speculation about (presumably Islamic) sabotage of the train.
However, the evidence available so far — which is admittedly scanty — doesn’t support the idea of sabotage. Below is a CCTV clip of the derailment, first at normal speed, then in slow-motion:
What we see in the video is that the second car in the train derailed first. The flash — which some people describe as an “explosion” — came after it tipped over, when it hit something near the track. The video is not clear enough for us to discern what flashed, but it could have been a transformer on a pole, or something similar.
Another car further back also buckled out of line a split second later.
This is consistent with the train’s hitting a curve at a high rate of speed while beginning to brake. It was, according to numerous accounts, traveling at more than twice the speed limit.
When the engineer realized what was wrong, he must have said, “[expletive deleted]!”, and hit the brakes hard. If all the cars didn’t have equally effective brakes, they would tend to accordion, which is exactly what we saw in the video. The ones with weaker brakes buckled out of line, since they were now going faster with the ones with stronger brakes in front of them.
Thus the accident could be explained by the excessive speed, and then braking. No sabotage is required.
We are left with some questions, however:
- Why was the train going so fast?
- Isn’t the speed on these trains automated?
- What was the Mohammed Coefficient of the train driver?
In this case, there were actually two drivers. Both survived, and one of them (who is under police custody in the hospital) is named Francisco José Garzón Amo. So the Mo-Co here can’t be more than 50%.
Then there’s the report than someone heard an explosion. But, after watching this video over and over, I’d say that there must have been a lot of events in those first five seconds that sounded like explosions.
The only possible point of sabotage would seem to have been a disabling of the train’s automatic speed control. However, the train driver is said to have boasted on Facebook about how fast he likes to drive his train. Could he have overridden the automated controls in order to travel at the speed he preferred?
Below are relevant excerpts from a Reuters report:
The International Committee of the Red Cross is cutting back its services in Afghanistan due to an attack on its offices in Jalalabad at the end of May. A security guard was killed and the building was badly damaged in the assault.
. I will do a more thorough review of this book later this year. At the moment, I am tied up with completing my own upcoming book, Witness to Madness.
, by the courageous Dutch politician Geert Wilders. Vladimir Bukovsky, a former Russian dissident under the Communist dictatorship of the Soviet Union who spent years as a political prisoner in the Soviet Gulag, argues that there should have been a “Nuremberg trial” of sorts after the fall of Communism, just like there was after the fall of national Socialism at the end of the Second World War.
Dymphna is ill at the moment with bad eye allergies, among other ailments, and can no longer monitor and approve comments on her posts. It’s all I can do to manage that with my own posts, so I don’t have time to do hers, too.
