Metrolink Engineer Sent Text Message Before Crash

Robert Sanchez, the Metrolink engineer who was piloting the train that crashed in Simi Valley on September 12, had sent a text message seconds before the crash that killed at least 25 people and injured 135, the Los Angeles Times reports.

The National Transportation Safety Board confirmed that Sanchez had been text-messaging, but withheld additional information pending further investigation. The Times story, however, cites the reports from academic research on the crash:

Investigators have not said whether they think the text messages played any role in the crash or affected Sanchez's ability to operate the train. But the two USC academics calculated for The Times what may have happened just before the crash.

Using the NTSB figures that Sanchez's train was traveling 42 mph in the area from the red signal to the collision point and correlating the times of his text messaging, Najmedin Meshkati, a USC engineering professor and veteran transportation safety expert, estimated that the last text message would have been sent about five seconds after Sanchez sped past the signal.

Gokhan Esirgen, laboratory director for instructional physics at USC, also calculated that Sanchez would have sent the last message just after the light. He believes this timetable provided little or no time for Sanchez to react after he saw the oncoming train.

Even if Sanchez wasn't sending a text message at the exact moment of the crash, he may have had "inattention blindness," said David Strayer, a University of Utah psychology professor who's studied cellphone use's effect on motorists.

"If you're busy text messaging and you're taking a minute or so to key in a message, you're obviously not going to see the things that go by when you're looking at the keyboard and screen," said Strayer, adding that it often takes motorists five to 10 seconds to readjust their focus to the road.

Read the whole thing, here.

I followed the story closely the first couple of days after the crash, although I hadn't seen any formal confirmation of the text-messaging story beyond the first day's reporting (my wife first mentioned that the engineer had been sending text messages, which she had learned on the radio).

The Times ran an interesting graphic a couple of days after crash, which explained the deadly nature of the impact. It turns out that the two front engines of the freight train, which was heading southbound at about 41mph, weighed nearly twice as much as the entire Metrolink commuter train (545,000 each). The freight train's head-on impact drove the Metrolink locomotive back into the first passenger car of the commuter train, killing the occupants.

This story is devasting. My heart goes out the families and the survivors.

Congress will require that all train track-systems in the country will have smart technology to stop trains heading for collision by 2015. The systems are now in use in other parts of the country, but not California.