A catastrophe on its doorstep
23/08/2006

ELSA GRANDA  -  Villada
EL PAÍS  -  Spain - 23-08-2006

Pipas Facundo workers hold a minute’s silence, ending with applause, for the victims of the Villada accident.

It was five to four in the afternoon of August 21, when the residents of the houses next to the railway tracks and the workers of the Facundo snacks company heard a crash. The intercity train, comprised of six carriages and the engine, which was travelling from Vigo to Hendaye and was carrying 280 passengers, had derailed on its way through the locality of Villada.

Only a few metres separate the Pipas Facundo car park from the track, exactly where the accident occurred; a wire netting gate opens up on to the railways tracks. Dozens of people, improvised doctors, nurses, psychologists and fire fighters passed through this gate for hours.  Nothing was what it seemed: a 1,000 square metre building was turned into a field hospital, the houses into improvised first-aid posts. Their stories were heartbreaking. Many people and good organisation; that is what there was in Villada. Their effort has been praised and they are proud, but with that feeling of sorrow of not having been able to do more.

The closeness of the Pipas Facundo facilities meant that its more than 100 employees had to cope with the situation before the emergency services arrived. Alberto felt the floor shaking and said: “That train is going fast, isn’t it?” After many hours looking after the injured, he set off to Bilbao with his lorry, and, on his way, at a bar in Vitoria, he was puzzled: “I recognized some of the people from the accident. The bus that Renfe had put on to take them to Irún broke down on the way and there they were.”

The chief executive of Pipas Facundo, Vicente Villagrá, pointed out: “They brought out lorries, took lockers down, grabbed fire extinguishers, brought people out, healed the injured … We all did what our hearts told us to do”.

The first research into the train accident pointed to the fact that the train was travelling at more than 100 kilometres per hour on a stretch where it could not travel at more than 80 kilometres per hour. Although the generic speed on that stretch is limited to 130 kilometres per hour, at points like those that the train went through before derailing, the conventional maximum speed is between 30 and 80 kilometres per hour.