• Trial The tears of the driver of the Alvia before the judge: "I ask the victims to forgive me, it was an accident, I couldn't help it"

  • Courts The defendant from Adif, beaten by the father of an Alvia victim in the first session of the trial: "Now you show your face"

"If I had braked four seconds earlier, we would not be here now. We are here for four seconds," Andrés Cortabitarte, a former Adif official who was in charge of traffic safety when the railway line between Ourense and Santiago in which the Alvia train accident occurred, leaving 80 dead and 144 injured.

Cortabitarte, co-accused as responsible for the accident along with the train driver, Francisco José Garzón Amo, declared this Thursday in the trial that is being held in the Criminal Court number 2 of Santiago and in his statement he discharged all blame for the accident on the driver, assuring that it was his "unthinkable" driving that caused the accident.

The driver was traveling at 199 km/h in the vicinity of the accident curve when he answered a call to the corporate mobile phone made by the train controller.

In the 100 seconds that it lasted, he should have slowed down, but he did not notice that there was an advanced signal beacon E'7, which should be the reference point to start the speed reduction to 80 km/h.

He did, he started to brake when he saw the curve, but he only managed to reduce to 179.38 km / h.

Cortabitarte considers that, had he started to brake just four seconds earlier, the train would not have derailed.

In his statement before the judge, Cortabitarte chose to give very technical explanations, which led the prosecutor, Mario Piñeiro, to try to specify and focus the statements to make them more understandable, trying to simplify a testimony riddled with rules and technical terms.

After much cross-examination, he managed to get her to make more direct statements.

Among them, the former Adif senior official concluded, without any doubt, that "the cause of the accident is the driver's failure to comply with speed."

The Prosecutor's Office holds Cortabitarte responsible for not having acted, as security director, to prevent the predictable human error of the train driver in a curve full of peculiarities and a specific point with a significant security transition in which the security system is no longer applied of high speed because he is going to get into a dation, but he unloaded all blame.

He assured that "there are 1,800 curves in the railway network with those characteristics or even worse" than that of A Grandeira in which the Alvia derailed and "364 points with significant changes in speed were identified, of which 48 are in high speed and in intersection of stations" and, nevertheless, "in 30 years in these significant speed changes we have never had an accident".

The controversial call of 100 seconds

He appealed to the driver's training (a title and a license with 35 hours of training on the line and 80 hours of training on the machine) and his experience to ensure that it was the driver who had to have acted to mitigate the risk that involved that point on the rail network and was particularly harsh on the mobile phone call he answered.

"It is unthinkable that someone is talking 100 seconds at the most important point on the line," he criticized.

The driver, in his statement, acknowledged that this call "misplaced" him, but clarified that he was "obliged" to answer it, since the auditor made it to the corporate cell phone.

The prosecutor maintains in his indictment that "the tragic accident would not have happened if ADIF, more specifically, the Directorate of Traffic Safety and the accused Mr. Cortabitarte López, as head of the same, had evaluated and managed the risk of excessive speed in the section of the accident".

Responsibility is attributed to him for not having carried out a prior risk analysis when issuing a Safety certificate, without which the high-speed line 082 could not come into operation and for authorizing the disconnection of the ERTMS safety system on the section of the accident. .

In his statement, Cortabitarte denied that he had to have evaluated those risks, because, in the security department that he occupied, "a function that we do not have is the evaluation or analysis of any risk" and so that the train can start operating, eight security certificates are issued, not just the one issued by him.

In fact, he assured that "you will not find in my company" the existence of a single safety certification that allows the line to enter service.


Victims call for greater responsibility

The Victims Platform of Alvia 04155, the majority among those affected by this accident, announced this Thursday, before Cortabitarte's statement, that he has transferred to his lawyer, Manuel Alonso Ferrezuelo, that they "understand" that there is a "greater responsibility" in Andrés Cortabitarte, ADIF traffic safety director, than in the driver ("without ignoring the driver's oversight and human error") and thus must be taken into account when making his final conclusions of the trial.

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  • Santiago de Compostela

  • Ourense

  • Train accident in Santiago