bad weather....really bad weather and Amtrak

[George Harris]

You know, I used to think that there were cases sufficiently clear cut to not be government conspiracy listed as a theory by somebody. Until I saw one on that disaster. Oi veigh isht mehr.

Somebody has a CONSPIRACY THEORY on this accident? Haven't seen that one. The goofiest one I have seen lately is the one that had a picture of the inside of an empty enclosed automobile carrier and said it was for transport of prisoners to concentration camps and the tie down chains seen it the picture were for prisoner shackles.

 

[Green Maned Lion]

Yep. It seems that the FBI has it in for Amtrak so they intentionally drove this barge into the bridge. Because nobody would be stupid enough to enter the Bayou Canot, blah blah blah. Wouldn't have known that, would you?

 

[DesertRat]

I dunno. We get really high gusty winds here in the Mojave sometimes. I see trains going even then.

 

[George Harris]

Yep. It seems that the FBI has it in for Amtrak so they intentionally drove this barge into the bridge. Because nobody would be stupid enough to enter the Bayou Canot, blah blah blah. Wouldn't have known that, would you?

Some people have way too much time on their hands and no worthwhile interests to fill it. Brings to mind the 18th and 19th century saying, "An idle mind is the devil's workshop."

 

[wayman]

In most major disasters there is a whole series of events leading up to it. Remove any one of them and the incident will either not occur at all or be signincantly different. Who knows how many others could have happened but for the absence of any one of the many smaller events that would have to have been combined to make it happen? you do the best you can, but, "Time and chance happen to us all."

I never got the sense that TrackSentinel was saying "a train blown off the Sandusky Bridge would be just like the Sunset accident". Of course it wouldn't--totally different circumstances.

There will be a ton of differences--you're less likely to have an engine in the water, much less a burning, exploding engine in the water. You're not in the middle of nowhere--people will be able to respond immediately and get to the accident site with no difficulty. Visibility of the accident site is great, not atrocious. The distance the cars would have fallen is, I imagine, less.

Result: probably much less death. Impossible to predict that accurately, of course, but I think the degree of severity all around would be far, far less for a train going off the Sandusky Bridge.

But if any passenger cars actually blew off the bridge and into the river, then you've got passenger cars--with passengers--in the water, and at that point there are some similarities. Passengers will panic; some will be injured; water will start filling some of the cars; rescue crews will have to do water rescues; etc. Superficial similarities given how vastly different the other circumstances are, but still similarities.