Spanish society celebrates its tenth anniversary today without leaving the most deadly and shameful curve in its recent history, that of A Grandeira, in the Angrois neighborhood of Compostela, watered with the blood of the 80 deceased and the 144 injured in the rail accident on July 24, 2013. Late in the afternoon, at the entrance to Santiago from Ourense, the Alvia Madrid-Ferrol derailed, full to the brim with being the eve of the central day of the Compostela festivities, of the Apostle Santiago and of the Galician homeland.
The improvised collage that has been forming since the summer of 2013 on the railing of the bridge over the tracks is the main testimony of the accident. It occurred due to the driver’s mistake right at the end of a high-speed section, where there was no automatic safety mechanism to alleviate human error
There are three days left until the trial of the Alvia macrocause ends, without therefore provisional or final sentence. This can take about two and a half years or more, if one takes as an analogy what happened with the Prestige case, also tried in the Court of A Coruña, with a high complexity and a large number of parties. There is still no real, independent investigation, since the one that the Ministry of Public Works did to itself was disqualified by Brussels. Even so, in this decade there have been known various negligences recorded in the design and management of this Santiago-Ourense line, while the lies accumulated since its inauguration in December 2011 were becoming evident.
The day after the railway disaster with several dozen deaths, the person in charge of the ministry, after visiting the site of the tragedy, announced his resignation with impeccable arguments. “I resign from my position as Minister of Infrastructure and Transport. I feel it is my duty to do so as a minimum show of respect to the memory of the people who died so unjustly,” he wrote on Twitter. Later, the head of the Government announced that two senior officials from the main public railway companies had left their posts. None of this happened in Spain, but in Greece, after the crash of two trains in Tempe, on February 28, in which 57 people died and whose political responsibility was immediately assumed in first person by the conservative minister Kostantino Karamanlís.
Due to the derailment of Sanatigo, it is no longer that anyone resigned or was dismissed, but that there were promotions. It had also happened with the Prestige oil slick. In the case of the Alvia, just over a year after the accident, the president of Renfe, Julio Gómez-Pomar, was appointed Secretary of State for Infrastructure. The Minister of Development at the time of the accident, the popular Ana Pastor, later held the presidency of Congress and yesterday she was re-elected deputy. Her predecessor, the socialist José Blanco, who was a deputy when the tragedy occurred, went to the European Parliament the following year. He now has a golden retirement in Enagás.
As in Greece in 2023, a prominent political movement took place in Spain the day after the rail disaster, albeit in just the opposite direction and behind the backs of public opinion. On the saddest afternoon of July 25 in memory in Galicia, Minister Pastor and the head of the opposition, the late socialist leader Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, verbally sealed in Angrois what can be called the pact of the curve.
Rubalcaba went to visit the scene of the events and received a warm welcome from the minister, with whom he agreed to close ranks on what they considered a matter of State, as it affected the export of High Speed. Spain had obtained the contract for the Mecca AVE and, in the midst of the economic crisis, aspired to take over the contract for the Brazilian line Río-São Paulo, which in the end was not built.
The curve pact was also a way to cover political backs. In the Pastor stage, because it gave errors and caused delays, the best security system, Ertms, was disconnected, which did not reach the curve, but was able to stop the train just before, when the driver got confused talking on the phone with the conductor. And in the Blanco era it was decided that the new line would end in Angrois, integrating with the one from the 50s, with the curve and without advanced security.
The lack of risk assessment of these crucial decisions was denounced in his appearance at the trial by Christopher Carr, former head of security for the European Railway Agency. This body dismantled in a 2016 report the maneuver carried out by the government of the popular Mariano Rajoy, with the support of the PSOE, to focus all responsibility on the driver, as the then Minister of the Interior, Jorge Fernández Díaz, began to carry out from minute 1.
“You cannot leave a catastrophic risk in the hands of an individual, because they can make mistakes,” said Carr against the conclusion of the Independent Commission on Rail Accidents (CIAF), whose report was disqualified by the EU, due to its dependence on the ministry.
The Angrois catastrophe has a continental dimension as it is one of the largest in recent decades, with the particularity of high mortality, as of the 224 passengers, 144 were injured and 80 died, 36%. And that surely what worked best in the whole catastrophe was the emergency service, since the evacuation of the wounded and their health care, in charge of the Xunta, was as fast as possible. He helped that the special device for the apostle fireworks was ready.
Without having a mortality statistic in large claims, perhaps there are higher percentages than Angrois, but it is undoubtedly very high. In the accident in Germany in 1998, with 101 deaths, over 25% of the passengers perished. In Greece this year it was 16% and in Paddington, United Kingdom, in 1999, 5%, with 31 deaths.
The European intervention aborted, at the last moment, the final act of the pact of the curve, a trial with only the driver Francisco Garzón on the bench. The Court of A Coruña had to reopen the investigation and the prosecution accused Andrés Cortabitarte, then a senior officer of Adif, the public company in charge of the railway infrastructure. From 2013 to 2016, the public ministry had been preventing Adif and Renfe from even being investigated, despite what it learned about the non-assessment of risks or the warnings about the dangerousness of the curve.
And in June, already in the conclusion phase of the trial, the prosecution returned to its old position and withdrew the accusation against Cortabitarte. About the responsibilities in this type of catastrophes in Portuguese the expression that “guilt cannot die alone” is used. The one from Angrois seems to once again have a single suitor, the driver, although it will be seen in the sentences, since it must be assumed that the case will end up in the Supreme Court. It will be the last link in the judicial and political ordeal that the victims of the brutal derailment of ten years ago are still going through.
