Towboat Crew Tells of Wrong Turn, Fire at Rail Bridge : Disaster: Captain testifies he believes his barges struck span in Alabama. Safety board closes hearings on Amtrak’s worst accident.

The testimony of towboat crewmen Wednesday reinforced growing evidence that barges lashed to their vessel rammed a bridge a few minutes before an Amtrak train plunged from the disabled span into a bayou, killing 47 people.

Willie C. Odom, the man who was at the helm of the towboat Mauvilla, told a National Transportation Safety Board hearing that he became lost in the fog as he headed up the Mobile River in the early morning darkness of Sept. 22 with six heavily laden barges.

Odom said Wednesday that when the fog began to lift and he saw the burning wreckage in the muddy backwaters of Big Bayou Canot, “it dawned on me what had happened. . . . I thought, ‘Oh my Lord, I made the wrong turn.’ ”

Asked if he thought that the barges had struck the railroad bridge, Capt. Andrew Stabler, commander of the towboat, replied: “Yes, I do.”

NTSB investigators say that laboratory analysis of scrapes on the barges shows that two of them struck the bridge and shoved it out of alignment. Eight minutes later, the Los Angeles-to-Miami Sunset Limited hurtled onto the crippled bridge at more than 70 m.p.h. and catapulted into the bayou. Many of the victims were trapped in rail cars that caught fire as they began to sink.

“We got some of the survivors on the boat,” Odom said in a deposition released with his testimony. “I asked them how they were doing, and I told them, ‘I’m sorry.’ ”

The crew’s story of what happened after the towboat and barges left an anchorage near Mobile about 1 a.m. for a trip up the Mobile River to Birmingham was provided in Wednesday’s testimony and in depositions taken shortly after the wreck.

As the Mauvilla headed upstream through the uninhabited bayou country north of Mobile, “it started getting hazy,” said Odom, who was standing the midnight-to-6-a.m. watch along with a deckhand, Charles Taylor.

Odom, a 45-year-old pilot, said that although another pilot aboard the towboat Tom McKay farther upstream reported by radio that the weather ahead was relatively clear, “it started getting foggier and foggier on me.”

Odom said that he ordered Taylor to look for a tree along the bank to which they could tie up until the fog lifted.

“I’m thinking that I’m in the Mobile River, but I’m not in the Mobile River,” Odom said. “I’m in the wrong river.”

Investigators say that what Odom actually had done was swing left without realizing it into Big Bayou Canot, a tributary not used by commercial barge traffic that is spanned by a low-slung, unlit CSX Railway bridge.

“I looked in the radar, and I seen this object in front of me, which I thought was another tow,” Odom said. “It looks like a tow (that) done swung across the river.”

Deciding to tie up along this “tow,” Odom said, he advanced his string of barges slowly toward it in the gloom.

“Then I felt this bump,” he said. “It wasn’t no real hard bump. It wasn’t a real soft bump.”

Stabler, who was asleep in his cabin, said the impact awakened him.

“I got up to see what it was,” the 46-year-old captain said Wednesday. “At the time, I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

Odom said he had begun attempting to recover two of his barges that had broken loose when he “heard this noise--whoosh!--and I seen this fire.”

That, NTSB investigators say, was the Sunset Limited as it careened off the crippled bridge and plunged into the bayou. Several of the sinking railroad cars had begun to burn.

It was 2:53 a.m.--eight minutes since the barges had struck the bridge.

“I was confused,” Stabler said. “The fire added to the confusion. . . . Willie said we were somewhere near Thirteen-Mile Marsh. If we were where Willie said we were at, there wouldn’t be nothing burning but the woods.”

Coast Guard officials say that at 3:05 a.m.--12 minutes after the Sunset Limited had crashed--Stabler put out a Mayday distress call on his radio.

The captain said Wednesday that at that point, he still did not know that the fire had resulted from a train wreck. He said he put out the call simply because he feared that his drifting barges might be a navigational hazard.

Coast Guard transcripts of the radio conversations that followed show that the confusion mounted. Railroad sources reported the track wreck, but no one was quite sure where it was.

Finally, at 3:19 a.m., Stabler radioed: “We’re about 300 to 400 yards below something up here, I guess it’s the Amtrak, and it looks like a terrible mess up here. We’re gonna tie off our tow and go up as close as we can . . . and see if we can render any help to survivors.”

In the minutes that followed, Stabler said, the Mauvilla pulled 17 survivors to safety. One of them was Charley Jones, a waiter on the Amtrak train.

A dispute has arisen over what the Mauvilla’s crew members may have said to Jones.

Jones has said that Odom admitted the barges had struck the bridge and said that he might lose his job, or even go to prison, because of it. Jones said the man gave him a slip of paper with the name of the Mauvilla’s owners--the Warrior & Gulf Navigation Co.--written on it.

On Wednesday, Odom denied talking to any survivors or giving anyone a slip of paper. In his deposition, Taylor said that while it was he who gave Jones the slip of paper, he never offered any opinions about how the accident occurred.

While Stabler conceded on Wednesday that the barges had struck the bridge, Odom refused to do so, saying he thought he had “run aground.”

And while Odom testified that he attempted to tie up beside a tow--one that later turned out to be a bridge--he never made clear why he would have made that attempt without first trying to establish contact by radio.

NTSB member Susan M. Coughlin, who chaired the three-day hearings that ended Wednesday, cut short several questioners who attempted to resolve apparent contradictions and inconsistencies in the testimony and depositions.

With millions of dollars worth of potential liability suits still pending, she made it clear that “we did not come together to assign liability, fault or blame.”

The NTSB is charged with determining the cause of what was the worst train wreck in Amtrak history. A final report on the board’s conclusions is expected within a year.