Andrés Cortabitarte, director of Security at Adif when the line of the worst railway accident in Spain in the last 80 years was launched, denied that his department had the power to evaluate and make decisions on the matter that gives, precisely, its business name .
The team that he directed only issued "one of the eight certificates" that were part of the file that was sent to the Ministry of Public Works so that it would give the green light to the start-up of a road, according to this former director, accused along with the driver of the Alvia in the catastrophe in which 80 people lost their lives and another 145 were injured.
With the lesson well learned and a speech full of technical data and figures, such as that in the Spanish railway system "there are 1,800 curves with the characteristics of the accident or even worse", Cortabitarte has discharged responsibility, above all, in Francisco José Garzón Amo, the driver of the Alvia 730 on the day of the accident, on July 24, 2013. But he has also pointed to the construction joint venture (Siemens-Dimetronic), which "develops the security system" and is the one who " evaluates the risks”, and Renfe, the operating company.
The latter, said the senior official, was the one who had to "enable" the drivers "with 35 hours" of training on the line and "80 on the machine."
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The odyssey of the victims of the Alvia, turned into railway experts: "We had to investigate ourselves"
When the accident occurred, he has repeated several times, "there were 116 qualified train drivers" on this line.
On the day of his statement, Garzón Amo assured that he was practically a rookie on that route from Ourense to Santiago, because he had received training on a second alternative line and an isolated diesel locomotive, with other safety features, and that to this day since the tragedy he had only done that service nine times each way.
This is one of the singularities of this macro-process: the opposing position occupied by Adif and Renfe, the former as responsible for the infrastructure;
and the train service, the second.
For the companies and their insurers, the payment of compensation worth 57,686,636 euros is at stake.
The State Attorney's Office here only represents Adif, which also collides with the Prosecutor's Office, as the voice of the victims that specifically assumes the accusation by 53 injured parties without their own lawyer.
Cortabitarte has categorically defended that "the cause of the accident was the failure of the driver to comply with the speed."
And he stressed that the absence of signs warning the driver that he had to slow down when leaving the last tunnel before the fateful A Grandeira curve where the train derailed (where the transition between the high-speed line and the conventional one, and from 200 to 80 kilometers per hour, at the entrance to Santiago) was "correct" and "complied with the regulations", the only thing that his department had to ensure.
“The signage was correct according to the regulations at that time.
Without a doubt, it was enough”, he assured in response to the insistent questions of the prosecutor Mario Piñeiro.
“In the year 2011, 2012 and 2013″, that is, until the accident “changed everything”,
At that time, according to Cortabitarte, “if the train driver had complied with the regulations” of Renfe, the time book and the table that marks the maximum speeds on each section, “this accident would not have happened and we would not be here [at the trial] ”.
Moreover, he has specified, "we are here for four seconds", the time that Garzón would have needed to hang up the call received on the company phone, realize where he was and stop.
The official has described that the road signs did indicate the kilometer point at all times, and that based on this an "experienced" driver would have to know that he was entering the station area.
“A train conductor, when he enters a station, it does not occur to him to speed past.
There are reduction steps, because he has to stop ”,
He has defended the exalted position in his self-exculpatory account.
“The train driver has to attend to this, it is vital, as do the 4,800 train drivers that we have in the network”, he has settled.
The only explanation for the train accident in Santiago, for which he was Adif's Head of Traffic Safety at the time the line was launched, is “a human issue”.
“It is unthinkable that someone at the most important point of a line is telling the train, through the dead man's pedal, 'I'm fine and attending to driving', deceiving the train when it is not so, because the driver was talking 100 seconds on the phone, circulating at 190 per hour.
Talking, moreover, about something that was going to happen an hour and a half later”.
Cortabitarte was referring by this to the conversation with the comptroller through the corporate telephone.
The colleague had called Garzón to notify him of the particular conditions of some travelers who had to get off at Pontedeume (A Coruña),
a stop after Santiago and close to Ferrol.
Cortabitarte has come to say this morning that answering that call was "illegal", something that the driver of a "bus in Despeñaperros" or "the pilot of a plane landing" would not think of doing.
The driver assured the day of his statement that according to Renfe regulations it was "mandatory" to answer the corporate mobile at all times.
"You don't even know how to lie"
In his interrogation as a defendant, Cortabitarte has decided to answer only the questions of the Prosecutor's Office and his own lawyer, Ignacio Sánchez, to whom he assured that the complaints of the train drivers collected in a letter about the dangers of the curve (Garzón warned of this to his Renfe boss in Ourense) never arrived at Adif, "nor did they have to arrive".
He, as he has said, was one more piece of the complex mechanism that made the road safe, through, in the case of his department, "inspections and audits", and that certification of compliance with European regulations (Cenelec, Committee European Electrotechnical Standardization) which was based on the construction company's safety dossier.
At the end of the trial, for the third time, the former head of Adif has been booed by relatives of the victims.
"You don't even know how to lie", they have shouted at him,
Among many other things.
According to what the spokesman for the Alvia 04155 Victims Platform, Jesús Domínguez, said today, those affected have decided “unanimously” that the Traffic Safety command has a “greater responsibility” than the train driver.
In the first session, Cortabitarte received a blow from behind, a reason that his lawyer brandished to get his statement, scheduled for Friday of last week, to be postponed until after the October 12 holiday.
The national police identified after the attack the father of a young woman killed in the accident and today has done it again with another person who rebuked the only charge that has come to trial.
those affected have decided "unanimously" that the Traffic Safety command has a "greater responsibility" than the train driver.
In the first session, Cortabitarte received a blow from behind, a reason that his lawyer brandished to get his statement, scheduled for Friday of last week, to be postponed until after the October 12 holiday.
The national police identified after the attack the father of a young woman killed in the accident and today has done it again with another person who rebuked the only charge that has come to trial.
those affected have decided "unanimously" that the Traffic Safety command has a "greater responsibility" than the train driver.
In the first session, Cortabitarte received a blow from behind, a reason that his lawyer brandished to get his statement, scheduled for Friday of last week, to be postponed until after the October 12 holiday.
The national police identified after the attack the father of a young woman killed in the accident and today has done it again with another person who rebuked the only charge that has come to trial.
was postponed until after the October 12 holiday.
The national police identified after the attack the father of a young woman killed in the accident and today has done it again with another person who rebuked the only charge that has come to trial.
was postponed until after the October 12 holiday.
The national police identified after the attack the father of a young woman killed in the accident and today has done it again with another person who rebuked the only charge that has come to trial.
Throughout two and a half hours of testimony, Cortabitarte has gone off the rails again and again (especially when the prosecutor tried to specify) in his technical descriptions, beginning with the construction phases of a road from the moment of pave the land and throw the ballast until the start-up of the computers that control the system.
He has said, to emphasize the driver's fault, that "the designer" raised the accident curve "with a safety margin of 100% of the comfort speed".
In other words, that section, upon reaching kilometer point 84,413, "could withstand the passage of a train without risk at 160 kilometers per hour", when "80 is the comfort one, to which a traveler does not spill the Cup of coffee".
This margin, according to him, is double to "absorb driving errors."
This Thursday, in the trial that will last until June in the CINC building of the Cidade da Cultura
of Compostela, the defendant has said that the line where the accident occurred had been subject to 140 inspections and that "the slightest risk" had not been detected.
Nor has he declared himself responsible for the decision to disconnect the ERTMS speed control system on the Alvia 730, equipment that would have prevented the catastrophic outcome.
As he has said, it was disconnected, after being installed, at the request of Renfe because its operation was "disastrous" and it gave "failures" in many places.
There was, then, he has specified in his effort to flood his speech with exact data, “195 ERTMS disconnections” with passage to the ASFA system, used in Spain “since 1975 ″.
In all these other places, "the train drivers did not have any problems."
In that case, "without a doubt" according to Cortabitarte, the driver of the Alvia who came in the cabin from Ourense had the obligation to comply with the maximum speed book, to which the chief prosecutor of Santiago has reproached: "So I am a driver , I get to that point with those peculiarities [of risk] and I am alone before any failure”.
The Adif official has denied that "peculiarity" of the A Grandeira curve about which there were warnings from the train drivers and which, according to him, Renfe did not transfer to him.
“With these characteristics or even worse, there are 1,800 curves in the general network”, he has reiterated both when he responded to the prosecutor and to his defense attorney.
In the railway route in use in Spain “there are 364 significant speed changes, 48 on high-speed lines, all at the entrances and exits of stations... In 30 years,
