Information Released On 2016 Chester Amtrak Derailment
by Ian Bush
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Federal investigators note an "overall lax safety culture" at the railway work site in Chester where a deadly Amtrak crash happened last spring.
It's part of several thousand pages of documents detailing the investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.
Among the new details: the train's engineer tested positive for drugs.
Several hours after the April 3rd derailment, blood and urine tests performed on 47-year-old Alexander Hunter came back positive for marijuana.
But a video camera trained on his cab shows him responding to alert tones in the minutes leading up to crash.
A ruling on the cause is likely to come later this year. But in a track and engineering analysis, the NTSB notes "an overall lax safety culture" at the railway construction site where Amtrak 89, carrying nearly 350 people and traveling 106 miles an hour, plowed into a backhoe.
Hunter tells investigators he saw no flag men or signs alerting the train to work on the tracks.
Once the construction came into view, he says in the interview, there was nothing he could do but sound the horn, throw on the emergency brake, and hit the deck.
The operator of that railway construction equipment and a supervisor were killed. Several dozen people were hurt.
