A preventable tragedy in Mexico City
Lesson summary
Hi there, welcome to Plain English lesson number 366. I’m Jeff in Chicago; JR is the producer; and you can find this full lesson at PlainEnglish.com/366. For those of you new to Plain English…welcome. Every Monday and Thursday we talk about a trending topic or an item in the news, all at a bit of a slower speed so you can understand every word. Follow along with the full transcript at PlainEnglish.com/366.
On today’s lesson: An elevated metro train collapsed in Mexico City. The line was plagued by structural problems ever since it opened about ten years ago. We’ll talk about how to use the English expression “in charge of” and we have a quote of the week.
Search for answers after train accident in Mexico
Mexico is searching for answers after an elevated train collapsed into the street below, killing 25 people and injuring about 80 more.
The accident happened on Line 12 of Mexico City’s metro system at about 10:25 pm on Monday night, May 3. The train was traveling on an elevated portion of track between Olivos and Tezonco stations in the southeast of the city when the last two cars of the train fell into the roadway below.
Passengers said they heard a loud noise, the lights went out, and they fell onto each other. Smoke filled the inside of the train cars. Those trapped inside desperately tried to free themselves by breaking the train’s glass windows. Passengers were instructed to lie on the floor to avoid destabilizing the train.
CCTV video played and replayed on social media shows the collapse sent a shower of sparks and a plume of dust and debris into the air. People in the bustling area rushed to the train to help as the dust cleared, revealing a chaotic scene of tangled wires, twisted metal, and concrete rubble. The first people in the area passed out water and helped rescue people from the wreckage.
Rescue efforts began immediately, but had to be stopped out of concern that the train cars were unstable, even as people remained trapped inside the fallen cars. Only after cranes came to stabilize the train cars could the rescue efforts resume. Floodlights illuminated the scene overnight on Monday, as ambulances, fire trucks, and military personnel assisted in the rescue effort. A helicopter circled overhead.
As late as Tuesday afternoon, a list of victims still had not been released. In the confusion, people went from hospital to hospital, searching for missing relatives, often without any luck. Children were among the casualties. A man pinned inside his car was rescued from the roadway below.
In this area, the tracks are about 16 feet, or 5 meters, above a roadway. The structure is made of regularly-spaced concrete columns topped with horizontal steel beams that support a prefabricated concrete bed. The tracks rest on gravel on the concrete bed.
Preliminary investigations show that a steel beam between two columns collapsed under the weight of the passing train. Two train cars fell into the hole, forming a V-shape.
The collapse happened on the newest line on the system. Line 12 has been plagued by engineering problems since its inauguration in 2012. The line had to be shut down in 2014, just two years after it opened, for extensive repairs to damaged tracks. An investigation later punished 38 government employees for improperly contracting the work; some criminal charges were filed.
Then in 2017, an earthquake exposed additional structural problems with the line. One of the vertical columns supporting the elevated structure started to crack; concrete from the structure started to fall off. One of the horizontal beams supporting the concrete train bed also came loose.
In response, Mexican authorities simply patched up the visible problems. They reinforced the one column that showed cracks and they added braces near the one horizontal beam that had come loose. But they didn’t investigate whether there were hidden problems in any of the other beams or columns. There was never a wholesale structural review of the line.
Residents near Line 12 said they noticed cracks in the concrete and they said the whole structure shook when trains went by. One passenger said he knew there were structural problems with the line, but that he had no idea they could have caused an accident this bad. Another said that authorities didn’t pay close enough attention since the line served a relatively lower-income area of the city.
Notably, none of the older lines in the metro system suffered problems like this, even after the 2017 earthquake and several other major earthquakes in the decades before.
Relatives of the victims are now calling for justice. The accident promises to shine an uncomfortable spotlight on several well-connected politicians, including two of the country’s most prominent politicians. The mayor of Mexico City when the line was built, Marcelo Ebrard, is now the country’s foreign minister and has been in charge of obtaining the coronavirus vaccine for the country.
Both he and the city’s current mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum, pledged full cooperation with an external investigation. Prior to the accident, they had both been considered potential successors to the country’s current president when his term is up in 2024. Today, though, they are facing uncomfortable questions about the original design of the system and its ongoing maintenance.
A Norwegian company that has not been involved in the construction or operation of the line will be appointed to investigate the cause of the accident, the mayor said.
Mexico City’s sprawling metro is the tenth-most-popular metro system in the world, according to a 2019 ranking. It opened in 1969 and carries about five million people per day across 12 lines and 195 stations. Ticket prices are fixed at 5 pesos, or about 25 cents, one of the cheapest urban transportation systems in the world. As a result, the metro doesn’t generate enough money to cover its expenses, and so must rely heavily on government subsidies for repairs.
A preventable tragedy
What a sad story. I saw an interview with a structural engineer in Mexico who said this was a completely preventable tragedy, and it does seem that way. It is a somewhat positive sign that they’ll have a company from another country investigate what happened, and hopefully they can do that free of interference so the truth about this accident can be found.
Great stories make learning English fun
