Lawyer: We are going to hold Amtrak accountable for train derailment

Six people injured in Monday’s deadly train crash in DuPont are planning to sue Amtrak.

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The group hired a Chicago-based law firm known for handling personal injury cases against airline and rail companies.

Clifford Law Offices partner Michael Krzak told KIRO Radio that the derailment that occurred Monday is “another incident in the past few years where an Amtrak train is speeding down the line, almost three times the speed limit, on a curve.”

“The goals are to find the root cause of this and hold Amtrak accountable because all evidence that we’ve seen so far points to Amtrak and some systemic problem within Amtrak or some lack of training.”

Krzak says they will look at “every angle” of previous incidents, including what Amtrak has done since an Amtrak train traveling from Washington D.C. to New York City derailed in Philadelphia, killing eight and injuring more than 200 people. The NTSB ruled the derailment was caused by a distracted train engineer.

The derailment in DuPont, like the one in Philadelphia, occurred on a curve that should have been taken at a slower speed.

According to the latest information from the NTSB, the train was traveling at 78 mph in a 30 mph zone. Approximately six seconds before the train derailed, an engineer “made a comment regarding an over speed condition.”

“The engineer’s actions were consistent with the application of the locomotive’s brakes just before the recording ended. It did not appear the engineer placed the brake handle in emergency-brake mode,” according to the NTSB.

The National Transportation Safety Board confirmed that safety technology that would have automatically slowed the train was not installed.

The six people Krzak is representing will suffer “long-term” effects from the crash, he said.

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