FELA Lawyer News Blog

RENO, NV – The Amtrak conductor who was killed in last Friday’s deadly Reno train accident with an eighteen wheeler truck has been identified as Amtrak employee, Laurette Lee.

Amtrak told KOLO eight News that Lee was a conductor and a long-time employee. She began working with the company in one thousand nine hundred eighty eight and worked out of Amtrak’s Reno team base.

Amtrak’s California Zephyr was en route from Chicago to Emeryville, Calif., with some two hundred passengers and fourteen squad members when the accident occurred late Friday morning about three hundred miles east of its destination.

The incident occurred when a truck driver attempted to stop his eighteen wheeler before it slammed into the side of an Amtrak passenger car, killing him and five other people on the train and injuring about twenty others in the flamy crash, authorities said Saturday. The truck driver worked for the John Davis Trucking Co., of Battle Mountain, Nevada.

Investigators at the scene about seventy miles east of Reno found skid marks at the railroad crossing on U.S. 95, indicating the driver attempted to stop his tractor trailer before Friday’s crash, Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Dan Lopez said.

“They have measured the skid marks, and it should be able to tell us what speed he was driving at the time of the accident,” Lopez said, adding he was uncertain of the speed.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Six people were killed and twenty eight remain unaccounted for in the flamy collision of a semi-trailer and an Emeryville-bound Amtrak train in the Nevad desert, officials said late Saturday.

It wasn’t until Saturday afternoon that the wreckage was safe enough to permit search teams to inject the burned-out hulks of two passenger cars in the 10-car train that exploded in a fireball on Friday.

A team of eighteen investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board is examining the wreckage, but they don’t yet have a total explanation of why the crash occurred.

Two other truck drivers observed in horror and disbelief as the lead semi-tractor trailer in their convoy failed to stop for flashing warning signals and plowed into the train, the federal investigators said.

” The two other trucks noticed the signs and took act,” NTSB member Earl Weener said at a briefing. “The lead truck did not stop.”

Two rail cars that were badly charred in the accident remained on the tracks near the crash site, seventy miles east of Reno.

Truck accident lawyers, Gordon, Elias & Seely say that there is tremendous difference in size and weight inbetween trucks or eighteen wheelers and automobiles often result in death or permanent and serious private injuries. A big equipment or eighteen wheeler usually weighs in excess of 80,000 pounds and the tractor trailer combination may be over seventy feet long, therefore, its stopping distance takes far longer than a car. Too often, catastrophic and fatal accidents are caused by the negligence of the truck driver, evidenced by:

• Inattentiveness to construction zone signs or switches in traffic
• Driver distractions
• Following too closely
• Other human errors [exhaustion, toasted driving, DUI, etc.]

California cities near Nevada with a high incident of big equipment, semi truck and eighteen wheeler accidents include Brentwood, Oakland, Sacramento and San Jose to name a few.

Published by FELA lawyer news blog at Gordon, Elias & Seely, LLP

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