85 Die When 2 Train Cars Plunge Into Mexico River

At least 85 people died and more than 100 were injured before dawn Wednesday when a crowded passenger train ran off a bridge during a torrential downpour and two cars plunged 30 feet into a river in the northwestern state of Sinaloa.

Manuel Meraz Morena, a radio operator for the municipal police department in Guasave, Sinaloa, said there were 85 dead and 108 injured among the passengers of the second-class train that was traveling the Pacific coast route from Mazatlan to Mexicali. He said rescue operations were continuing through the night.

U.S. officials said they were unaware of any Americans citizens among the victims. A survivor of the crash, however, said in a telephone interview that he saw six Americans traveling in the first car of the train, two of whom he said died.

Jorge David Lozano Nunez, 28, a resident of Los Angeles, said he saw officials recover the bodies of two fair-skinned women he had heard speaking English on the train before the crash. He said three men and a woman, all of whom spoke English, survived the crash.

“The scene was ugly,” Lozano said. “The bridge, the tracks, the train were crashed. There were bodies. A woman lost her whole family. Many lost their money. People were crying, looking for their families. You could hear screams, people crying ‘Daddy,’ ‘Mommy,’ ‘Elena’. . . .”

Red Cross officials said most of the victims drowned.

The accident occurred at 4:30 a.m. in a remote, agricultural area about 50 miles southeast of Los Mochis, according to Ferrocarriles Nacional de Mexico, the national railroad company.

In an official statement, the company said: “As a consequence of the torrential rains, a bridge was destroyed . . . derailing train No. 409. . . . Two of the four passenger cars turned over and fell to the bottom of the arroyo. The other two cars were derailed. . . .” In addition, two cargo cars of the six-car train derailed, officials said.

Enrique Gutierrez, a reporter for El Debate newspaper in Guasave, said most of the passengers were “poor people, workers, farmers, women with children.”

Dr. Lorenzo Almazan Bonora, director of the government Social Security hospital in Guasave, said he received 85 patients with injuries, 12 of them very serious.

Gutierrez said survivors told him the train had been traveling “at very high speed. They said it was late.”

Lozano, a native of Chilpancingo in Guerrero state, said the train was full and he was asleep in the aisle of the first car when suddenly he was hit by a wall of water.

“I was drowning. The water pulled me out of the window. A little boy from Oaxaca was behind me,” Lozano said.

He estimated that he was in the water for about three minutes and passed out.

“I woke up in a field of crops. There were five or six dead bodies around me. I think I was about (two miles) away, because it took me three hours to walk back to the accident,” he said.

Lozano found one of the two cousins he was traveling with but has been unable to find the other.

“It was Dantesque,” said Gutierrez. “I saw 50 dead, but they are talking about many more. . . .” He said the train fell about 30 feet.

It was the fifth serious train accident in Mexico this year.