Firehouse Expo 2019: Philly FF Learns from Train Crash

Oct. 11, 2019
Philadelphia Battalion Chief Vincent Mulray discussed the lessons he picked up from initially commanding the scene of the fatal 2015 derailment of Amtrak Train 188.

When an Amtrak passenger train derailed in his Philadelphia fire district, killing eight and wounding at least 200, Battalion Chief Vincent Mulray wished he had had a can of spray paint. Followed closely by better lighting.

He has them both now readily available thanks to the lessons he learned from the crash of Amtrak Train 188 on May 12, 2015.

“When you’re the incident commander at a scene like that, you’ve got to be able to tell your crews were to go and what to do,” Mulray said during a class, “Lessons Learned from Amtrak 188 Passenger Train Crash," at Firehouse Expo in Nashville, TN.

With seven cars and an engine creating a debris field at least 600 feet long, Mulray said the spray paint would have made directing resources to the individual cars much easier. He would have used the can to assign numbers to the cars, helping to define the scene quickly. It eventually happened, but doing it during the first few minutes of the two-hour long rescue would have made things easier.

Mulray, who was the incident commander for the first 24 minutes of the call, said access to, and more importantly, visibility at the night scene were challenging.

“Our main lighting was from a police helicopter,” said Mulray, a 30-year veteran of the Philadelphia Fire Department who is now a deputy chief and division supervisor. Hand lights were also widely used but not very effective because of dust and debris in the air that made it appear smokey.

Since the crash, the fire department has invested in battery-operated, portable scene lighting, which helps tremendously at incidents like the wreck of Train 188.

Mulray offered some background on the crash, explaining that the engineer of the ill-fated train “lost situational awareness” and sped up to a speed to 106 mph on a sharp curve, causing the train to derail. Although the engineer had been charged on two separate occasions, the cases have been dismissed.

“He forgot where he was, and that’s the official cause for this particular accident,” Mulray said. “Human error.”

That mistake claimed eight lives, critically injured 46 and caused minor injuries to more than 100 other passengers.

“It’s the people who are the most important part of this,” Mulray said. “It’s the eight people who died in this train crash. That’s the reason we are all here.”

Mulray said he had two major objectives throughout most of the incident, especially in the 24 minutes he had command.

“I had to keep going back to my priorities, making sure the rail line was shut down and the power was shut off,” Mulray said. “Those were my two biggest things. Calling for additional help was secondary, but I was afraid of another train entering  the scene and someone getting electrocuted.

Mulray explained that the track between Washington, DC, and New York City is electrified with the engines running on power provided through a system of catenary wires and poles. The wires that contact the trains are 12,000 volts and managed by the railroad companies, while the lines above can carry up to 138,000 volts and are maintained by the electric company.

A constant threat to passengers and rescue personnel at the scene was the possibility of deadly shocks.

“We thought we had that taken care of because we didn’t have anyone dropping from being shocked,” Mulray said.

He was less sure about the Northeast Corridor being shut down and was constantly looking out for trains winding down the tracks that supply a $2.1 trillion East Coast economy.

“It’s kind of a big deal to shut down the whole corridor, but we didn’t have any choice.”

The immediate deployment of ladders proved to be helpful as the rail cars, lying on their sides are about 11 feet high, Mulray said. The only way to get inside the stainless steel hulled passenger cars was to go in through the side window,  which were now the top of the wreckage.

Battery-operated rescue tools also proved to be important to the equipment arsenal to free trapped patients, he said, noting that battery-powered reciprocating saws were instrumental in freeing people who were caught in interior seating and wreckage. Cutting through the stainless steel bodies just didn’t prove practical, he said.

Mulray said he wishes he had spread out staging, perhaps up to a mile instead of the two or three blocks it initially covered. He initially called for a two-alarm response with five additional medical units. However, the first police officer on scene asked for “everything you’ve got,” escalating it to a four-alarm response. He said he prefers a measured response so resources are managed and assigned as needed, rather than having everything arriving at once. 

“We’re used to using the incident command system to have a metered system of calling for help,” Mulray. “You can account for, and manage the resources. If I call for four alarms all at once, I can’t manage that 40 companies. I wouldn’t be able to even keep track of them on a piece of paper.”

Mulray said the police response was a blessing and a curse at the same time. More than 200 officers showed up at the scene and helped tremendously with patient care and scene control. However, each one showed up with a cruiser and parked them in the middle of the streets, virtually shutting down the area to other vehicle traffic. That’s why he said he had wished he had closed down more of the area around the scene for staging.

Other lessons learned included the importance of keeping tourniquets readily available.

“A tourniquet is a must-have, low-expense item that we should all be carrying,” he said.

He noted it’s important to bring tools and equipment immediately to the scene. He praised the ladder companies for bringing ground ladders to the derailed cars for access. He offered praise to the first due officer who decided to deploy a three-inch hose for suppression just in case. While the line was never charged, it provided a visual route for victims to follow out of the scene to safety.

Better lighting was required, and obtained, and more medical bags at the scene would have been useful, he said. “We didn’t have many of them at the scene,” he said, adding that triage was actually conducted away from the derailed cars because of the hazards at the scene, including an “octopus” of wires and poles strewn about and the reality of a second train entering the site.

“Our success was due to the collaborative effort of the public safety community, including police, fire, emergency medical personnel and many others,” Mulray said. “The fire department didn’t solve the problem by itself. It was a communal effort.”

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