Spain’s deadly train crashes have damaged public confidence in the system

Pedro Sánchez and his socialist-led coalition government are racing to rebuild trust ahead of a snap election, but the task they face is immense

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A week ago today, for the second time in nine months, I got in my car and drove south from Madrid to cover a deadly train crash.

At 8.53am last Wednesday, a high-speed train operated by Spain’s state-owned rail company, Renfe, smashed into the back of a stationary train run by the private rail company Iryo, on the outskirts of the small town of Urda in Castilla-La Mancha. Sixty-nine people died in the accident, more than 100 were injured, and Spain’s already depleted confidence in its treasured rail network plummeted.

As I drove to Urda, I – along with much of Spain – was feeling a grim sense of deja vu. On 18 January, an Iryo train on the same line from Madrid to Seville had derailed near the Andalucían town of Adamuz before being struck by a Renfe train coming from the opposite direction. Forty-six people died, scores were injured and public trust in Spain’s trains was badly shaken.

The things I saw and heard in Urda mirrored those I’d seen and heard in Adamuz: local people rushing to the train tracks to help the injured; the rapid repurposing of municipal halls into emergency triage centres; and all manner of spontaneous acts of selflessness, bravery, practicality and compassion.

Some of the passengers whose journey south had come to a violent and premature end near Urda stood in line, many still with their wheelie cases and rucksacks, waiting for the coaches that had been chartered to take them onward. The queues looked almost normal until you noticed the odd bandaged head, torn trouser leg, or bloodstained top.

Josimar Medina, a young Peruvian who was travelling with his Brazilian girlfriend, Vitoria Maia, told me the blood on his brown T-shirt belonged to an American called Austin. Medina had helped free Austin from the wreckage and had managed to get him out of the train.

Although the young American was badly hurt, Medina had seen far worse injuries as he clambered off the train. “I saw … people missing limbs, and I saw one person who had nothing left below the chest,” he said. “I saw people with their heads crushed and people with mutilated arms.”

The shock and sorrow has echoed around Spain as the country tries to come to terms with what has happened, and to accept that its extensive and modern speed rail system – long a source of national pride – may not be the safe and reliable network it once seemed.

As the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, put it last week, “public trust in the high-speed system has been broken”.

Sánchez and his socialist-led coalition government are now racing to rebuild that trust, but the task they face is immense – especially given the current circumstances.

How will this play out in the elections?

The anger and grief are still raw and, with a snap general election now less than a month away, the political atmosphere is explosive. The prime minister’s critics point out that 115 people died at Adamuz and Urda, and Sánchez and his ministers have had eight years to focus on, and invest in, rail safety. On Tuesday evening, the transport minister, Óscar Puente, accepted the inevitable, announcing his resignation, with the acknowledgment that “neither the country, nor I, can bear 100 deaths in less than a year”.

With the election drawing closer, the language from opposition parties is becoming more strident.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of the conservative People’s party (PP), which is expected to finish first in next month’s vote, has accused the Sánchez administration of failing to keep Spaniards safe and of trying to use the latest tragedy to political ends.

“It’s not just obvious that they’re not good at being in charge,” Feijóo said on Monday. “It’s that I’m also not sure that they’re good people, either.”

The far-right Vox party, with whom the PP could form a national coalition government, has been even more scathing, accusing the government of “killing” the train crash victims and of “incompetence, corruption, cronyism, and a lack of investment in maintenance and infrastructure improvements”. It is also urging the supreme court to investigate Puente on suspicion of manslaughter and causing bodily harm through gross negligence. Puente has rejected allegations of mismanagement, and has insisted that Spain’s railway system is “safe and reliable”.

Despite signs of a modest resurgence in support just before the latest crash, Sánchez always faced a tough road to re-election. Corruption scandals have bedevilled his inner circle and his government was much criticised for its response to the mass crossing into Spain’s north African territory of Ceuta over the summer. That road now looks even more impassable.

But with disasters, emergencies and deaths so frequently politicised, especially in Spain, the worry now is that solutions to the failings at Adamuz and Urda may be missed amid all the campaigning and point-scoring.

As the politicians bicker and Spain prepares for its fifth general election in 10 years, the long process of recovery is just beginning for some of those who survived last week’s crash.

On Saturday afternoon, I got an email from the family of Austin Hartman, the young American pulled out of the train by Josimar Medina. They told me that Austin, a Cal Poly State University student who had been studying in Madrid, was being treated in a Spanish hospital for multiple fractures to his pelvis, hip, femur, humerus and rib, and was unlikely to be well enough to return home for at least two months. GoFundMe pages have been set up for Austin and his friend Leah Silver-Fajardo, who was also badly hurt in the accident.

His family had seen the photo I took of Josimar and Vitoria in Urda and wanted to know if there was any way of contacting them so that Austin could say thank you. By the following day, Austin and his family had video called the couple.

“It was so helpful for us to … thank Josimar for treating Austin with such loving care when he needed it more than anything,” Austin’s stepmother, Sandi, told me in an email on Tuesday. “Austin credits him with saving his life. As we know, beautiful things are born of tragedy and it’s usually in the relationships that are formed out of it.”

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