Buenos Aires Commuter Train Crash Kills 49, Injures 550 - BusinessWeek

February 22, 2012, 1:05 PM EST

By Richard Jarvie

(Updates number of deaths in first paragraph.)

Feb. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Forty-nine people were killed and more than 550 injured when a packed commuter train ran into the buffers and safety barriers at one of Buenos Aires' busiest railway stations.

The crash, the second-worst in Argentina's history, may have been caused by brake failure, Transport Secretary Juan Pablo Schiavi told local media. The train entered the station at 26 kilometers per hour (16 miles per hour) and probably hit the barriers at 20 kilometers per hour, he said.

"It was like a whiplash," one woman said as she left the train's freight car, which had been packed with standing passengers. Until the crash, the ride had been normal, she told local television at the Once terminus in central Buenos Aires.

The train is owned by closely held Trenes de Buenos Aires SA, which said it is investigating the cause of the accident.

The crash caused 49 fatalities, including one minor, police spokesman Nestor Rodriguez said. Emergency health service officials estimated more than 550 people were taken to the hospital. Most of the dead and severely hurt were in the first two carriages, according to eyewitnesses.

Emergency workers rescued some of the victims after cutting the roof off a carriage, while helicopters and ambulances carried away others. Workers also lifted the injured, tightly packed inside carriages, from the wreckage through windows.

Hundreds of people went to the station looking for relatives who had traveled on the train, which crashed at about 8:30 a.m. in the middle of rush hour.

Argentina's worst railway crash occurred in 1970, when two trains collided near Benavidez, 48 kilometers from Buenos Aires, killing more than 200 people.

In September, at least seven people died and 214 were injured in another Buenos Aires neighborhood when a train crashed into a bus and then veered off the tracks to collide with another train.

That train, which also belonged to Trenes de Buenos Aires, was on a commuter line that links the center of the capital with its western suburbs. TBA, as the company is known, is owned by a group of Argentine businessmen and took over the services from the government in 1995.

--Editors: Harry Maurer, Philip Sanders

To contact the reporter on this story: Richard Jarvie in Buenos Aires at rjarvie@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Dale Crofts at dcrofts@bloomberg.net.