At least 76 people were taken to area hospitals last night for treatment of injuries that ranged from minor to critical. Most went to Washington Adventist Hospital, Washington Hospital Center and Howard University Hospital, officials said.
Officials described a chaotic scene in which hospitals braced for mass casualties, and media crews and relatives of potential victims descended upon waiting rooms and parking lots, searching for any scrap of information about what had happened.
The bulk of the injured seem to have gone to Washington Adventist, near the crash site. Officials at Washington Hospital Center say seven patients were treated there. One required surgery. Six have non-life-threatening injuries.
Even early this morning, said Ron Harris, a spokesman at Howard: "Our phone lines are still flooded with people looking for relatives from the crash."
Harris said the hospital got a call from two parents in New York who hadn't heard from their daughter and feared the worst. It turns out she was still out of the country on a trip in Switzerland, Harris said.
D.C. police said people looking for information about where crash victims might have been taken should call this number: 202-727-9099.
Among the victims at being treated at Howard was Lanice Beasley 14, who had multiple fractures to both of her lower legs and extremities and was taken to surgery. Two men, ages 51 and 20, were also treated for less severe injuries. The younger of the two was Jamie Jiao, 20 of Vienna. He was discharged shortly after 11 p.m., and recalled his experiences to a Washington Post reporter.
iao, a psychology major at the University of Virginia, said he was riding the Metro home from his summer job at the America Sleep Apnea Association, located near the Takoma station. He took the escalator up to the platform, which dumps him at the front of the train when it pulls into the station. Not thinking anything of it, he boarded the first car, headed west toward Metro Center. "It's just habit at this point," he said.
The train chugged along. "At one point it stopped moving for a bit." A voice came over the speaker system and said that train was stopped to wait for another train to move. "It was perfectly normal. Then we started moving again."
Jiao said from his seat three rows back in the first car he could see the other train in front of them. Again, he wasn't concerned, given the earlier announcement. A split second later, he said, there was a crash and a loud sound, like an explosion. "What happened after that was pretty blurry."
The impact knocked his glasses off. Both his topsider shoes were gone from his feet. He briefly lost consciousness. When he came to, "I started feeling pain in my lower back and foot." Jiao said he was bleeding under his chin and on his arms and legs. He thought, Did I hit my head? Did I break any bones? He looked around and saw someone near him, lying down and not moving.
"It was strange because I was sitting in the third row and there were people in front of me" before the crash, he said. After the crash, "other than that person who wasn't moving, everyone else was just gone. I don't know where they were or what happened to them, or what happened to the driver."
"I thought 'wow, this is crazy, I can't believe this has happened.' I thought, 'I'm lucky to be alive. I'm lucky that I didn't hit anything or break anything.' "
He crawled out of the rail car, in fear that it might come crashing down. "It was split open." He heard frantic passengers make 911 calls from their cell phones. "People behind me were trapped and calling for help."
Jiao said he sat on top of the other train "for a while. They me just to sit there." Firefighters told him they wanted to get to the people who were trapped before tending to him. They eventually got a ladder up and got him down.
Jiao's left ankle was badly bruised and swollen. Since his shoes were lost in the crash, he emerged from the hospital wearing a surgical shoe both on the injured foot and other the other foot as well. He was still wearing the white "patient disaster tag" authorities had put around his right wrist, a cheat sheet for the emergency responders arriving on the scene, to quickly gauge on the scene the level of his injuries.
The director of the office from his summer texted him right after the crash to ask him if he was on the train and was okay. As soon as he could, he called his parents, Haying Jiao and Jiazhen Yang, to tell them of the crash.
"I'm still in shock. I'm also pretty hungry, I haven't eaten since lunch," Jiao said late last night. "I'm thankful that not anything too serious happened to me. I was just lucky."
Tuesday 23 June 2009
More Than 75 Injured in Metro Accident Taken to Area Hospitals
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