Railroad

By Elizabeth Auster and Michael O. Allen, Record Staff Writers | Thursday, August 1, 1991

The Record (New Jersey) | Four Star B | NEWS | Page A10

“You have no idea how horrifying this has been.”
It was 9 p.m., 16 hours after the disaster. But Peter Cepeda, pacing agitatedly in Washington’s Union Station amid busloads of passengers who had just arrived from South Carolina, still could barely control his rage.
Yes, he was alive and bound for his home in Newark. But he makes his living in New Jersey as a doctor, and he had lost a patient Wednesday a man he didn’t know until Amtrak’s Silver Star derailed, and Cepeda, who had been in the third car from the rear, went looking for casualties in the next car.
The man’s arm and leg had been severed, Cepeda said, and he was bleeding profusely from multiple lacerations. Cepeda and another passenger, Robert Moore of Miami, said they tried tourniquets to stanch the blood. They tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation when the man periodically lost consciousness.
But at least an hour passed, Cepeda said, before he saw an ambulance. By the time help arrived, the man was gone, Cepeda and Moore said.
“There was nothing we could do,” said Cepeda. “It was a real traumatic experience.”
Cepeda was among several New Jersey residents on the Amtrak line who described the terror and mayhem that erupted when the train bound for New York derailed, killing at least seven passengers and injuring dozens of others.
Richard Umbrino Jr. and Arthur Colombino, both of Point Pleasant, took the train back from a Florida vacation because they were afraid to fly.
After landing Wednesday evening at Newark International Airport with four other survivors, the two men described bodies and glass flying about the train as it crashed. Umbrino said one of the men killed was seated just ahead of him.
“His leg was twisted around, he was bleeding from his head and chest, and I think his lungs were punctured,” said Umbrino, a 20-year-old junior at Kean College in Union.
Umbrino and other survivors contested claims that the train was below the 79 mph speed limit, saying that few on board could sleep because the train was moving so fast.
“The train was bouncing so much that’s why I woke up,” he said.
Cepeda, an obstetrician-gynecologist who is planning to move to Florida shortly, was not in the mood to be passive Wednesday night. While other weary survivors boarded trains in Washington to head north, he flatly refused, insisting that Amtrak find him another way of getting home.
“If they don’t put me on a plane I’ll find my own,” he insisted.
Cepeda was not the only survivor frightened of getting back on a train.
Thirteen-year-old Kim Williams of Brigantine, who was returning from a visit to relatives in Florida and traveling with her aunt, was flushed and clearly nervous as she followed directions from Amtrak personnel guiding her to a train headed north.
“It was very scary and I don’t know if it’s going to happen again,” she said. “I haven’t been able to eat all day because I’m afraid it’s going to happen again.”
Never on an airplane before Wednesday, Umbrino said flying would probably be his mode of long-distance travel from now on.
“I’m not going to be traveling on trains anymore,” he said. “Today was my first flight, and I liked it.”
Record Staff Writer John Mooney contributed to this article.

Keywords: NEW JERSEY; RAILROAD; SOUTH CAROLINA; ACCIDENT; DEATH; DISASTER; NEWARK; VICTIM; FLORIDA

Caption: PHOTO – RIC FRANCIS / THE RECORD – Richard Umbrino Jr., 20, left, and Arthur Colombino, 19, were among six survivors to arrive at Newark Airport on Wednesday.

ID: 17351241 | Copyright © 1991, The Record (New Jersey)