On November 28, 2012, Adif security inspector Carlos Ayuso González got into the cabin of one of the trains that covered the high-speed line between Ourense and Santiago to check if there was any "anomaly".
To this technician, who is still in the same position today and who had accumulated eight years of experience at the time, everything seemed correct.
"I did not notice anything strange" in the signaling of the fateful Angrois curve, he assured this Tuesday in the trial for the derailment that eight months later killed 80 people and injured 140. He did not appreciate any "special risk" either. in the sudden change in speed that the drivers had to make at that point, without any beacon to alert him.
A year earlier, the Galician chief machinist had warned his superiors of the danger,
but Ayuso maintains that he did not find out: "Nobody transferred anything to me."
For this Adif technician, the only cause of the tragedy lies in the mistake of the driver Francisco Garzón, who was responsible for stopping on time.
He has come to compare it with "entering a car on a highway and covering your eyes."
Ayuso ―whom the first judge in the case came to indict together with Adif and Renfe charges, but who was exempted from these accusations by the Court of A Coruña― has avoided assessing whether the signage in the section where the accident occurred was sufficient .
"We only monitor that what is there is fulfilled", he has argued, also stressing that analyzing the risks of the "human factor" does not fall within his security inspection powers.
The sudden reduction in speed that the train driver had to carry out to take the pronounced Angrois curve, from 200 kilometers per hour to 80, is for this Adif official "a normal thing".
"Like this speed change, there are more due to the railway geography and even greater", he apologized.
“It didn't catch my attention at all;
if the regulations are complied with, nothing strange has to happen”.
As reported by Ayuso,
The witness has used the regulations in force at the time of the tragedy to justify that no beacon alerted of this decrease in speed, which the driver Francisco Garzón Amo did not make on time because a phone call from the train controller misled him.
And he has assured that the alert about this deficit that the head of the Galician machinists, José Ramón Iglesias Mazaira, did give, never reached him or the Northwest Territorial Management of Adif, based in León: "We had no knowledge or neither in personnel nor in management that there was any type of deficiency in this line”.
Mazaira, who testified a few days ago in the trial, sent his superiors an email on December 26, 2011. He asked them to install side signals and beacons in the section where the Alvia derailed less than two years later to "help" to the drivers and thus prevent the entire burden of safety from falling on them being “excessively vigilant”.
This alert was dealt with in a commission to monitor the high-speed line between Ourense and Santiago that was held in Madrid and attended by Adif officials.
It was included in the minutes of the meeting, but Ayuso maintains that it was never known in the León offices.
Would you have taken action if you had received that notice from the train drivers? A lawyer for the prosecution asked him.
"Of course, yes," Ayuso replied.
The Adif inspector has acknowledged that these beacons were placed a month after the derailment and that he participated in the change: "It was a decision of who had to make it, period."
For this, he has added he, the regulations were modified.
Was it Andrés Cortabitarte, Adif's Head of Traffic Safety who sits on the bench, who made the change?
The Adif employee has denied it and has pointed to "the General Directorate of Railways, dependent on Fomento".
In his statement, the Adif inspector has defended that the driver's mistake, who did not start to brake on time before the curve after having a 100-second telephone conversation with the train controller, was "unimaginable".
And he has compared it to "entering a car on a highway and covering your eyes."
Evaluating the "human factor", Ayuso has maintained, was Renfe's responsibility, not his company.