Shock of rail tragedy gives way to sorrow and outrage in politically divided Spain
The latest train crash will pile pressure on the government of Pedro Sánchez, one month before the general election.
Shock from the rail disaster has turned into grief and anger in politically split Spain
The chaos and horror of Spain’s second rail disaster this year have been described in vivid detail by survivors of Wednesday’s high-speed crash, which has left at least 69 people dead.
But as Spain observes three days of mourning, disclosures from leaked audio recordings suggesting human error in a control room in the minutes before the disaster have shifted into public disbelief and outrage, in a deeply politicised atmosphere, exactly one month before Spaniards head to the polls.
“You don’t know what’s happening, you don’t know what has happened, you just know that you’re being thrown around in a matter of seconds,” said Iñaki García, 60.
He was aboard the stationary Iryo train that was struck from behind by a Renfe train on the Madrid-Seville line near Urda, about 140km (87 miles) south of the capital.
“There were people injured, walking around, there were dead people,” he said. “In the next carriage along there were a lot of dead people.”
Describing the horrific scenes around him, one young man told the BBC in a trembling voice: “I don’t know if that’s something I’ll ever recover from.”
More accounts of the tragedy have kept emerging. A pharmacist from Urda was among the first to arrive at the scene, carrying first aid supplies and medicine.
“One of [the passengers] was saying goodbye to his wife and children. His last words were ‘God is good’,” Antonio García told Spanish radio.
Comparable scenes of sorrow unfolded just nine months ago in the southern village of Adamuz, when a crash on the same Madrid-Seville route killed 46 people.
Now, in Urda, as in Adamuz, terrible stories are being matched by acts of kindness and solidarity.
Residents came out to assist the injured, bringing blankets, food and water to a nearby sports hall that was turned into a makeshift hospital for much of the day.
“We all started to turn out to help and we organised ourselves as best we could,” said Rosa María Domínguez, a local woman, who called the scene “a horror film”.
Yet the dominant feeling these two tragedies have produced is confusion and an inability to understand how this could have happened.
Until recently, the speed, efficiency and safety of Spain’s high-speed rail network, the largest in Europe, was the envy of neighbouring countries.
The Adamuz crash sparked a nationwide debate over whether the network was fit for purpose.
This latest disaster increases pressure on the left-wing government of Pedro Sánchez, in the middle of an election campaign in which his Socialist PSOE trails the conservatives in most opinion polls.
On Wednesday night, a protest over the government’s handling of the rail network drew far-right groups, who clashed with police.
Although the main parties, apart from the far-right Vox, have suspended campaigning, Sánchez has visited the crash site twice and his People’s Party opponent Alberto Núñez Feijóo went to Urda on Thursday.
From the outset, Sánchez’s transport minister, Óscar Puente, made it clear that a computer failure followed by human error was the likely cause of the crash. By late evening, leaked audio recordings of a control-room operator speaking to train drivers appeared to support that view.
Puente has long been a target of hatred for the right, and with two of the worst rail tragedies in Spanish history occurring under his watch, the criticism is set to grow.
Spain’s largest train drivers’ union Semaf condemned the leak of the audio recordings as irresponsible and biased. The union had already called a strike for Thursday to ensure that “urgency to travel is never prioritised over safety”.
One train driver, Vicente Almenar, told Spanish media: “They always look for the last link in the chain, where it’s weakest, but here the entire procedure failed because we don’t even know what our colleague was seeing on the screen,” he told Spanish media.
Sánchez had not expected rail safety to dominate his campaign, but that now appears increasingly likely.
After two accidents and more than 100 deaths on the same high-speed line, Feijóo told reporters in Urda on Thursday: “The Spanish people need answers. They are wondering what is happening to high-speed rail in their country.”
And he stressed that politics was not about talking — it was about acting.