Spain transport minister resigns after train crash kills 69

Spain’s transport minister, Óscar Puente, has announced his resignation following the October 28 collision of two high-speed trains near the village of Urda in the province of Toledo. The crash killed 69 people, among them one Czech citizen. Puente has also withdrawn from the candidate lists for the snap parliamentary election on November 29.

He announced his decision on Tuesday in parliament while answering lawmakers’ questions about the rail disaster. “The transport minister of a country like Spain cannot stay in office after two accidents in less than a year,” Puente said. He was speaking before the body that temporarily stands in for parliament, which was dissolved last month when the early election was called. Calls for him to step down began immediately after the disaster, but the minister had refused until now: last week he said his duty was to resolve the problem and provide explanations.

What we know about the disaster

The two high-speed trains collided on Wednesday, October 28, shortly before 9 a.m. They were carrying about 540 people. Sixty-nine died, and around a hundred of the injured had to be taken to hospital. The dead include 54 Spaniards and 15 foreigners, one of them a Czech citizen.

Technical failure and dispatcher errors

According to Puente, the collision was caused by erroneous instructions from the control center at Madrid Atocha station. Dispatchers took over control of a roughly 69-kilometer section of the Madrid–Seville line at 8:30 a.m., when the LZB safety system, designed to prevent train collisions, failed.

At that point six trains came to a halt. The drivers were then instructed by the control center to proceed. But one of the trains, because of technical problems, remained stopped before Urda station, and its driver reported this to the control center twice. Meanwhile, a Renfe AVE high-speed train had already set off and struck the stationary train from behind.

It appears that the AVE train was told to proceed at normal speed. However, according to some media reports, when the LZB fails, a rule applies: trains must first travel no faster than 40 kilometers per hour so that they can stop in time before an obstacle. At the moment of impact, the AVE was apparently traveling at between 160 and 200 kilometers per hour.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz