One Woman Killed In Rome Subway Collision
Posted October 17, 2006 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It didn’t happen in a tunnel but a frightening and deadly subway accident in Rome has brought back eerie echoes of Toronto’s own train tragedy.
The incident took place during Tuesday morning’s rush hour, as a train was waiting at a station in the Italian capital. Without warning, another set of cars appeared roaring in at full speed. It hit the trains in front of it, leaving one woman dead and 60 others injured.
The driver of one of the trains was pulled from the wreckage and taken to hospital, but survived the impact.
Police and onlookers aided in the rescue efforts, trying to extricate passengers from tangled twists of metal in the underground, as ambulances stood by to take the wounded to hospital.
There’s no official cause of the accident, but some witnesses report seeing the second train run a red light on the system and rush headlong into disaster.
“I saw the red light as the train moved into the station,” recalls passenger Andrew Trovaioli, who suffered a slight injury to his elbow. “I saw lots of blood, the impact was brutal … There was panic for some 30 seconds. We were not told how to get out.”
Officials closed the station where the accident took place, but the rest of the system continued to run.
The mishap mirrors a mid-tunnel subway accident in Toronto in August 1995. The worst tragedy in TTC history took place when an inexperienced driver missed a signal and ran his set of cars into another train just before the Dupont station on the Spadina line.
Three people were killed and 100 others were injured, with part of the Yonge-University line shut for weeks while the clean-up continued.
