Friday, July 26, 2024, 11:54
Eleven years later, the verdict has been handed down on the Alvia accident that derailed on 24 July 2013, leaving 79 dead and 143 injured. Criminal Court No. 2 of Santiago de Compostela has sentenced Francisco Garzón, the train driver, to two years and six months in prison, and the same sentence as the then Director of Traffic Safety at Adif, Andrés Cortabitarte. In addition, the convicted men are disqualified from practising their professions for four and a half years and ordered to pay compensation of 25 million to the victims’ families, which should be covered by Adif’s insurers if they are unable to pay. The prosecution had requested four years in prison for the accused.
Regarding the driver, the court considered it proven that Garzón answered a call to his mobile phone “not of urgency” from the train conductor so that a passenger who was getting off at the Pontedeume station, next to the Angrois curve, could know where to get off at the platform. The three members of that family died as a result of the derailment. “I ask the families of the victims to forgive me. But it was an accident, I couldn’t avoid it,” Garzón said in tears during the trial.
The judge maintains in the sentence that there was “an omission of the most basic precautions of a professional to check, before answering the call, where he was or even to do so during the conversation.” And she insists that Garzón not only ignored the instructions required by the work of a train driver, but also did not notice the side signals and a previous acoustic sound that announced the excessive speed of the Alvia.
As regards the charge against Adif, the sentence underlines that Cortabitarte certified that the line and its structural subsystem of Control, Command and Signalling met the safety conditions for its operation, which allowed the then Ministry of Public Works to authorise its commissioning. And it did so, as is considered proven in the sentence, despite the fact that the preliminary risk analysis carried out by the UTE to which the construction project of the aforementioned structural subsystem was awarded identified the risk of derailment. The sentence is not final and the defence can appeal before the Provincial Court of A Coruña.
According to the judge, both defendants breached the duty of care imposed on them by their positions, since their actions represented “an unlawful increase in the risk of a harmful result that they were obliged to prevent and capable of avoiding; and that, due to the importance of the legally protected assets put at risk, and which resulted in fatal damage, can only be classified as serious.”
The sentence is not final and the defense can appeal to the Provincial Court of A Coruña.
Security flaws
The investigation and the verdict of the Criminal Court number two of Santiago de Compostela have shed light on several key issues regarding the causes of the accident. The origin of the tragedy in which 79 people lost their lives was excessive speed caused by the driver’s inattention, who had driven the same stretch of road 59 times in 2013.
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