One Metro rider is sharing his harrowing story of being trapped on a train that filled with smoke Monday afternoon, killing one woman and injuring nearly 70 others.
The incident occurred around 3:30 p.m. Monday on a Virginia-bound Yellow Line train that had just left the downtown L'Enfant Plaza station, one of the system's busiest stations. The train stopped about 800 feet beyond the platform after the electrical "arcing'' involving the high-voltage third rail happened roughly 1,000 feet beyond the train.
Jonathan Rogers, 31, captured the 40 minutes he spent stuck on the train on his cell phone. In one video, you can hear people coughing and choking.
"It kept getting thicker, and people were getting lower and lower to the ground," Rogers said. "[S]ome people right away were having a really hard time breathing."
From the beginning, Rogers said, one woman was having more trouble than the others.
"We were like, 'This woman can't wait any longer,'" he said.
Rogers and two other people tried in vain to revive the woman who had slumped to the floor, unconscious.
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"We know you do chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth, so that's what we did,'' Rogers said in an interview Tuesday morning. "Nothing was happening and she was laying there unconscious. Somebody took her pulse and said they couldn't feel a pulse.''
After about 20 minutes, the group decided that the woman had to get off the train.
Rogers said a man scooped the woman up in his arms and carried her through the cars toward the back of the train.
It wasn't immediately clear if that woman was the same one whom authorities said died on the train.
Rogers said he doesn't understand why passengers weren't allowed to leave the train sooner for the one- or two-minute walk back to the platform.
"It just kind of felt like, 'Why were we trapped on that train that long?''' Rogers said. "All we did was sit there and wait. Forty minutes seems like a long time.''
NTSB investigator Michael Flanigon told reporters late Monday night that an electrical "arcing'' involving the high-voltage third rail led a train to stop in a tunnel and quickly filled the tunnel with smoke. An arcing occurs when electricity from the third rail comes into contact with another substance that conducts electricity, such as water.
There was water in the tunnel, but Flanigon said the cause of the arcing was not yet known.
In addition to the woman who died, three other people were in critical condition at a local hospital. Sixty-seven people were taken to hospitals, most with smoke inhalation, authorities said. More than 200 people were evaluated.
