Leigh Kurtzman

It was supposed to be a weekend full of banquets, deer hunting, and shopping to celebrate the service of thousands of war veterans. Things went terribly wrong when an unexpected train crash occurred.

Last Thursday in West Texas, a train collided with a truck during the “Hunt for Heroes” Parade, killing four U.S. military veterans and wounding sixteen. Both the train and the truck have been using the same route for the past three years, and nothing like this has ever happened before.

An ongoing investigation to determine the cause of this shocking tragedy is underway. The National Transportation Safety Board is examining eight specific areas including railroad signals, operations, mechanical elements, recorders, vehicle factors, motor carrier operations, human performance, and survival factors.

Member of the National Transportation Safety Board, Mark Rosekind, announced that “The grade crossing warning system was tested today. Lights, bells, gates, traffic lights, timing, synchronization…no anomalies, it was functioning as designed at the time of the accident.”

If there were no apparent problems with the system, then why did this accident occur? Investigators claim that the truck began crossing the train tracks even though the warning bells were sounding and the lights were flashing.

Residents speculate that the signal time is too short, and the guardrails are not completely down when the train is passing. There have been no more updates on the cause of the crash, but the investigation will continue in the hopes of determining what happened in order to ensure that nothing like this will ever happen again.