Dozens of cargo containers were scattered along a stretch of railroad track Tuesday morning after a dramatic train derailment near the Jalisco-Michoacán border. This is the second train derailment in the same area this year, following a similar incident on Jan. 31 in which three people were injured and the train caught fire.
At least two people were reported injured from this latest derailment and at least 30 cargo containers were dispersed across the train tracks and the adjacent farmland in the vicinity of San Francisco Rivas just outside the city of La Barca, Jalisco, which borders the state of Michoacán.
🚨Esta mañana se registró un descarrilamiento del tren de carga que va de Guadalajara-Pantaco en La Barca, Jalisco. Decenas de contenedores salieron proyectados y otros quedaron apilados y tirados sobre las vías o sobre los campos.
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According to La Barca Civil Protection authorities, one of the injured, a machinist on the train, suffered minor injuries and was treated and released from the hospital. The newspaper Milenio reported that there was a second person injured in the crash, but the authorities have offered no confirmation.
No information about the content of the containers was provided although National Guard and Army troops were on the scene to establish a secure area surrounding the accident.
The track operator Ferromex said the accident occurred at 4:23 a.m. on “Line I” just east of Lake Chapala, about 106 kilometers south of Guadalajara, the Jalisco state capital.
Ferromex declined to offer information about the possible cause of the crash, but the fact that cargo containers were scattered, upside down and piled on top of each other, suggests the train was traveling at high speed, speculated the newspaper La Jornada.
Other sources reported that the authorities were inspecting the area to rule out sabotage or vandalism.
The train was en route to the Pantaco cargo train station in Azcapotzalco, a borough in northwestern Mexico City.
Ferromex contacted its clients to inform them of the derailment and assure them their agents were on site to remove the containers and repair the tracks. Due to the remoteness of the crash site, the train operator was unable to get cranes and heavy equipment to the scene until Tuesday afternoon.
“Our people are just now arriving because it is not easy to get here,” a Ferromex spokesman told the Guadalajara-based news site Informador.mx, “and we have to walk the entire scene to assess the situation. We don’t yet know when we might get things back up and running.
All multimodal operations on “Line I” out of Guadalajara have been suspended until the track is repaired and inspected.
Ferromex operates over 10,000 kilometers of railroad track in Mexico, including six international crossings into the United States.
With reports from Milenio, El Universal, La Jornada, Excelsior and Informador.mx
