2 Amtrak construction workers killed when train strikes backhoe
By Dana Ford, Holly Yan and David Shortell, CNN Updated 9:09 PM ET, Sun April 3, 2016
To almost every question posed, Ryan Frigo gave some variant of "that's something that we will be looking at."
It will take time for investigators to determine exactly what went wrong and explain why the Amtrak passenger train crashed into a backhoe on a track near Philadelphia, killing two people Sunday.
"We're still gathering the facts," Frigo said.
Here's a look at what we know -- and don't know -- so far:
The investigation
NTSB officials will be looking at multiple factors that may have played into the crash: mechanical, operations, signal, track, human performance and survival.
Frigo said that the event data recorder and forward-facing and inward-facing video from the locomotive have been recovered.
The big unanswered questions: Why the backhoe was on the track near Chester, just south of Philadelphia? Why did the train continue its route from New York to Savannah, Georgia, when Amtrak construction workers may have been on the track?
And why didn't the construction workers move if a train was coming?
The crash
The two people killed were construction workers for the railroad service, a source close to the investigation said.
The crash Sunday morning also left 35 people injured, according to the Chester Fire Department.
The two fatalities were found on or near the backhoe, Pennsylvania Emergency Management spokeswoman Ruth Miller said.
The train was carrying about 341 passengers and seven crew members when it crashed, Amtrak said. The impact caused the lead engine of the train to derail.
The victims
Cristine Starke said the crash felt like an explosion.
"I think we crumbled under the pressure," Starke told CNN. "There's a hole, and it looks as if the train bent, and that was about two feet in front of me. It felt like an explosion. I ended up on the ground."
The debris was so thick that it looked like snow on the windows, she said.
Even before the crash, Glenn Hills said he knew something was wrong.
He didn't see the backhoe that lay ahead on the track. But "there was a lot of debris in the track, and we started driving through that," the Brooklyn resident said. "There was a lot of gravel noise."