Inside the dining car of Amtrak’s gleaming City of New Orleans train, 14-year-old Melissa Watson and five friends were deep into a game of spades and watching the movie “Simon Birch” Monday evening when they felt the car shake violently. The movie cut off. And the car was pitched into darkness.
When the lights momentarily flickered back on a few seconds later, the passengers came to a terrifying realization: Their car was disconnected from the one in front of it, careering off the track.
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Food and bodies were tossed about as the car came to rest in a deep ditch, only to have it fill with screams as some passengers thought they might be perched on the edge of a cliff. The car that had been ahead of them sat engulfed in flames.
“We looked over and saw the fire and thought, `This thing is fixing to explode,’ ” said Watson, part of a church group of high school students from Jackson, Miss.
In another car, three 17-year-old boys returning from the church group’s Canadian ski trip quickly composed themselves. Huddled inside their toppled car, Caleb McNair, Jeffrey Sartor and Michael Freeman parceled out responsibilities: Sartor would stay in the car and comfort people, Freeman would climb atop it to help people get out, and McNair would check on missing friends.
McNair, barefoot, climbed on top of the car and started running toward the other end in search of a friend. Suddenly, through a billowing plume of black smoke, he could see a conductor running toward him atop another car.
“His whole face was all bloody,” McNair recalled Tuesday, “and I thought, `Oh, my God, people must be dead.’ “
Portraits of both chaos and calm emerged from Monday night’s Amtrak crash–some people crying in fear and pain, others coolly setting themselves to the job of rescue.
Whether it was holding a frightened friend’s hand, sharing shoes with passengers in nightclothes or hoisting strangers out of the toppled train, many of the passengers found it in themselves to rise above the wreckage.
In Misty Varboncoeur’s car, panic ensued directly after the crash.
“Everyone was screaming and pushing and shoving to get out,” said Varboncoeur, 21, of Loda, Ill., a nursing assistant who was returning with three co-workers from a Chicago sightseeing tour.
“And then this guy, a young-looking guy, he sort of just calmed everyone down,” she recounted. One woman in particular was screaming hysterically. She had just entered Varboncoeur’s car, leaving her children in the car that subsequently burst into flames.
“I think he was a passenger. He just started telling everyone to calm down and we would be OK and we would get out.”
Although one of the four nursing assistants was badly injured, the other three women went back to the scene to help attend to the other victims.
The four women, coworkers at the Ford County Nursing Home in Paxton, were in the front seats of their train car chatting about their day in downtown Chicago. They had planned the outing a month ahead and decided to ride the last train home so they could cram a long list of stops into the birthday trip for one of the women, 23-year-old Cari Eyre of Rantoul.
Suddenly the train car jerked sharply and the lights went out.
In the confusion, nursing assistant Paula Dawson, 32, of Buckley, said she didn’t recall how she got out of the train. All she remembered was helping Eyre, the birthday celebrant, who had taken a good jolt and had sustained leg and shoulder injuries.
Varboncoeur remembered that they all went out the back of the car–“away from the fire, down through a door and down through the ditch,” which was about as deep as the train car was high.
The trio of women helped carry their injured friend as they joined the other survivors who were stumbling in and out of two ditches, across a short road, past a fence and into the nearby steel facility.
Once there, Varboncoeur said she began to “freak out” about all the injured people and told a fireman on the scene that she was a nursing assistant and offered her help.
“He said, `Great,’ so I went back through the fence and the ditches,” she said. On the service road between ditches, she encountered “an older man with gray hair shivering on a backboard.”
“He said he was having chest pains,” Varboncoeur said. “He didn’t have a coat or shoes on. . . . He was shivering so bad I was afraid he was going into shock. So I took off my coat and put it over him. . . . I told him we were going to get him some help.”
As Dawson returned to the train scene and helped rescuers with IV bottles, Varboncoeur moved on.
An 18-year-old girl, who apparently had Down syndrome, was also on a backboard. Although she was badly hurt, she was terrified and thrashing around, making it difficult for rescue workers to insert an IV, Varboncoeur said.
“I tried to calm her down,” said Varboncoeur. “It worked. I told her my name. She told me hers: `Jennifer.’ . . . We talked about brothers and sisters. I took her hand and just talked to her. She didn’t want to let go.”
Meanwhile, in McNair’s car, he and the other students did what their teachers always told them to do: Count off to make sure no one was left behind. They realized that one of the girls from their group was in the bathroom of the car.
Piles of luggage and passengers blocked McNair’s path to the bathroom, so he climbed on top of a seat, pulled the latch on the train car’s emergency door and hoisted himself out as if exiting a tank.
“I got up and I saw every single car piled up and I thought, `Oh my God, what has happened?’ ” McNair said.
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He made his way to the other end of the car and lowered himself between it and the next car. He found one of the group’s chaperons and heard the girl in the bathroom calling out.
It was pitch black, so McNair and the chaperon used the mini-light on the chaperon’s wristwatch to locate the door latch to the bathroom. They tried to pull it open, but it was jammed.
But McNair could see the girl’s hand. He grabbed it.
“I held her hand and I told her to calm down,” said McNair.
The chaperon stayed with the girl as McNair made his way deeper into the car, where he found a cluster of elderly people.
“They were piled on top of each other, and they needed some help,” he said.
Seconds later, emergency workers appeared above him and began helping people out.
One girl emerged without a coat, so Freeman wrapped his around her. Later at the hospital, doctors diagnosed him with hypothermia. He also suffered minor injuries to his shoulder and hip.
In fact, as Tuesday wore on, all three boys talked about how they realized they were more seriously injured than they first believed.
Though the car was not flush to the ground, the young men decided to lead people out the top because they spotted a mesh of wires beneath the car and were afraid passengers could have been electrocuted.
“We just thank God we all got out OK,” Freeman said. “I wish we could have helped more people.”