Amtrak victims work on healing after deadly derailment

Many Amtrak derailment victims continue recovering – physically and mentally – from the crash that killed three people and injured dozens more in DuPont.

Lawyer: We are going to hold Amtrak accountable

Adron Hall is one of the dozens hurt, but he is getting better.

“Slowly, painfully,” he said.

He says he’s taken the old Amtrak Seattle-to-Portland route more than 1,000 times. He still has a lot of work left to do with recovery, and says the passenger rail system in this country has a lot of work ahead too.

He was in train car two of Amtrak 501 last week when it derailed and plummeted onto I-5 below.

“Up, hit my head, thrown back down, thrown across, slammed into the ground, then bap, bap, bap — we had three or four more good solid multiple foot drops as we went down through,” Hall said.

The impact broke off four pieces off his lower vertebrae, caused other severe bruising, and left a gash on his head he didn’t notice until a first responder told him.

“He said, ‘You have a gouge right there.’ I went like this,” he said, touching his forehead. “And it was just blood all over my hands.”

He is recovering but can’t help remembering.

“Yeah, it gets played over and over in my mind,” Hall said.

He remembers things we can’t see in the pictures. He describes wood splintered everywhere, from the huge trees the engine took out on its way down.

“The dirt was freshly tilled from where the engine had smashed its course,” he said.

He was part of the rail advocacy group, “All Aboard Washington,” along with two of the three people who died in the crash – Zack Willhoite and Jim Hamre.

“That was pretty rough because walking up the hill I saw Jim, and (he) was gone already,” Hall said.

He’s long called for better, safer passenger rail but says knowing that positive train control — which can automatically slow a speeding train — was almost ready for this route was difficult to hear.

“It’s just a kick in the gut. We have it in place and they’re just not done testing it to turn it on, and then we had this happen,” Hall said. “The most immediate thing is get the PTC into place.”

A longtime rail investigator told KIRO 7 he believes crew members on the new route were hurried through the training. It’s something Hall says he also heard from an engineer in the weeks before this crash.

“It just seems like a whole confederacy of bad decisions where it got hurried … and people paid the price for it,” he said.

Despite everything, Hall says he still loves the rail and plans to ride the train again as soon as he’s healed.

“Some people might say, ‘Oh, you’re crazy,’ but one wreck doesn’t change the statistics that trains are pretty damn safe,” Hall said. “Minus a derailment, it’s the nicest way to get from Seattle to Portland.”

He says doctors tell him he should be able to walk and move around normally in six weeks.

Hall says Amtrak has reached out and is covering his medical bills.