'Bodies laying everywhere': 911 calls capture chaos, tragedy after Amtrak train derailment

SEATTLE – The woman's voice carried the urgency of sudden tragedy during the 2-minute, 10-second call placed shortly after 7:30 a.m. Monday.

"An Amtrak train fell off the I-5 overpass," she implored to the dispatcher fielding her call. "The train is hanging off the overpass, it's landed on vehicles and there's people like … there's, there's, there's bodies laying everywhere."

"How many patients are there, do you think?" the dispatcher asked her.

"How many patients are there?" the woman called out.

Garbled voices shouted somewhere in the distance.

"I see one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 — probably a dozen," she said. "And there's cars underneath the train."

Audio recordings of the emergency calls placed after Amtrak Cascades Train 501 jumped the tracks north of Olympia on Monday, crashing into a wooded embankment and onto Interstate 5 during the morning rush hour, captured the chaos and confusion of an unfolding catastrophe that injured dozens of people and claimed three men's lives.

"Tons of people are hurt!" another woman cried into the phone from one of the derailed passenger cars.

"Are you with anybody that's hurt?" a dispatcher asked.

"We're all hurt," she wailed.

As the woman cried details to dispatchers, her voice as a frightened victim intermittently transformed to that of instructive mother, as she quietly assured a son with a neck injury.

"We're going to get help, I promise," she told her boy.

The wreck also killed longtime rail advocates Zack Willhoite, 35, and Jim Hamre, 61, and 40-year-old Auburn resident Benjamin Gran.

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash. State transportation officials said Thursday they won't restart passenger service along the route where the train derailed until advanced safety systems are in place.

Footage from the train's inward- and outward-facing cameras shows the train's engineer was not using a cellphone before the crash, according to a preliminary NTSB report. About 6 seconds before the derailment, the engineer commented on "an over-speed condition," according to the report.

Through the series of calls from the crash scene, 911 dispatchers asked questions while they grappled to pinpoint the accident's location amid crying and confusion in their headsets.

A woman sobbed as a dispatcher patched her call to another, explaining: "Her vehicle is on I-5, airbags deployed. She was hit by a mudslide."

"And did the train fall down onto I-5?" the dispatcher asked.

"I can't tell, looks like it. I just saw a huge — I thought it was a mudslide. A huge cloud of mud and dirt came and hit my car and spun me around. God, I hope everyone is OK."

As the calls mounted, initially so did confusion in figuring out which agency was in charge of an emergency spilling across multiple jurisdictions. Local response agencies wondered if they should deploy to the scene.

"Hi Firecom, Batallion 20 here. Hey, I'm seeing that train derailment in DuPont. Is that pretty significant?" a West Pierce emergency dispatcher inquired.

"Yes, super significant," a dispatcher responded. "At least 12 bodies on the tracks and several vehicles under the train."

"Uh, that's what we're trying to figure out," another dispatcher answered.

Dispatchers seemed to gain control in coordinating a response in part by deploying all resources.

"I just need to find out what resources you've got and what do you need from us," a local dispatcher asked another at nearby Joint Base Lewis-McChord.