A Response of Grit and Grace

The emergency response to Wednesday’s commuter train wreck on the border of Glendale and Los Angeles was everything the region could have hoped for. All those earlier rehearsals, some in preparation for possible terrorist attacks, paid off.

Hundreds of firefighters, police officers, sheriff’s deputies and paramedics from jurisdictions across the county raced to rescue trapped passengers and get them to hospitals. At least 11 people died in the crash and about 180 were injured, but things that could have gone wrong -- confusion over who was in charge, missed radio connections -- didn’t. A command center resembling a small city rose with astonishing swiftness in a Costco parking lot, its orderliness in stark contrast to the derailed and jackknifed trains on the vast lot’s edge.

Costco workers were the very first responders to the predawn tragedy on their doorstep. They rushed out in the dark and rain, toward flaming, smoking rubble. The passengers themselves remained calm in the midst of chaos, helping each other. Residents countywide can take credit for passing a 2002 measure that increased property taxes to keep trauma centers open and able to handle the influx of injured.

Californians are tested veterans of devastating earthquakes, fires and mudslides. Wednesday’s man-made catastrophe may be even harder to comprehend. With one train car tossed on its side like a discarded toy and others crushed like cans of Coke, the wreckage looked like the work of a suicide bomber.

In fact, police say, it resulted from the act of a 25-year-old man, now in custody, apparently bent on suicide. He appears to have driven his Jeep Cherokee around barriers and onto the tracks, then changed his mind. He jumped out, leaving the SUV to be struck by one Metrolink train, which derailed into another coming from the opposite direction on another track.

It will be up to psychologists to discern what forces were acting on the SUV driver, and to the courts to determine what to do with him. Federal transportation safety experts will study the crash to see if barriers were adequate and whether the configuration of the Metrolink train -- the heavier locomotive was in the rear rather than the front -- contributed to the derailment. In the meantime, Californians can take some comfort in knowing that the response to this most inexplicable tragedy was carried out with grit and grace.