Town’s Aid to Amtrak Riders Helps Dispel Image Concerns

KINGMAN, Ariz. —  As work crews removed 16 derailed Amtrak cars from the railroad tracks outside this dusty desert town Sunday, talk turned to the last time reporters swarmed through its streets.

That was in 1995, when it was revealed that Timothy McVeigh allegedly recruited help in blowing up the Oklahoma City federal building during a stay in Kingman, a city of 13,000 near the Nevada border. To some, Kingman became synonymous with the burgeoning paramilitary movement.

The city that officials hope the nation will now remember is one whose residents banded together to offer food, shelter and succor to slightly more than 300 passengers of Amtrak’s Southwest Chief, which derailed near here early Saturday.

“Everybody hears negative things about Kingman. They think it’s the militia mecca of the U.S.,” said Christine Cummins, who moved her family here from Manhattan Beach, seeking the rewards of small-town life. “It’s unfortunate it takes something like this to pull the news media to see some of the positive things about Kingman.”

The city sits at the hub of four highways, a mix of tidy, single-family homes, trailers, fast-food restaurants, motels and churches.

It’s a town, residents contend, where everyone looks out for one another, which led Kingman to open schools, restaurants and homes to the hundreds of injured or marooned Amtrak passengers.

Repair crews were able to clear the wreckage in the predawn hours Sunday. By 11 a.m., one of the two tracks was open and the other was scheduled to be repaired by late Sunday.

“Traffic is moving now, that’s the good news,” said Debbie Hare, an Amtrak spokeswoman.

Trains began using the route later Sunday, although officials warned that there would be some delays because of the backup of freight trains and the reduced speed required around the accident site.

The Southwest Chief, bound for Chicago, departed Union Station in Los Angeles on time, at 8:35 p.m. Sunday, an Amtrak official said.

The collapsed bridge that caused the derailment apparently was damaged before the train reached the flooded desert gully, officials said Sunday.

The train’s engineer and assistant engineer both saw a dip in the track right before the engines hit the buckled rail, said Jim Hall, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.

Investigators were not sure whether the engineers hit the emergency brake or if it was automatically activated when the cars separated, Hall said.

Gauges indicate that the train was traveling nearly 90 mph when it hit the buckled bridge, a speed that the railroad’s owner, Burlington Northern-Santa Fe, will no longer allow.

Effective immediately, freight trains will be permitted to travel only 40 mph when flash flood warnings are in effect, Hall said. Passenger trains will be allowed to travel only 20 mph.

One passenger was released from the hospital Sunday, while 15 passengers and one crew member remained in five area hospitals, although none were reported to have life-threatening injuries.

Before the accident Saturday morning, local authorities and the largely volunteer search-and-rescue team were already out in force pulling people from desert washes swollen by the flash thunderstorm that officials believe caused the train wreck.

Within 15 minutes of the crash, authorities raced down Route 66 and set up a command post and triage center at the site. Officials paged the town’s volunteer firefighters. “Seems like half this town is a volunteer firefighter,” said Mohave County Sheriff’s Sgt. Mike Friend.

By 6 a.m., an hour after the crash, about 70 emergency workers were at the site, three-quarters of them volunteers, Friend said. Ambulances sped the injured to Kingman Community Medical Center, where the city’s amateur radio club set up a station to relay patient information to Kingman Junior High School, where the remaining passengers were taken.

City officials received predawn wake-up calls and installed extra telephone lines at the school. Restaurants sent sandwiches, coffee and pizzas. The town’s motels offered free rooms for the passengers. Wal-Mart sent over blankets.

More than two dozen volunteers milled about the school gymnasium helping the local Red Cross chapter care for the mostly bruised and shaken passengers. School workers wheeled out a television complete with videotapes of Disney cartoons for young passengers.

One helper was Cummins, who canceled her church softball game and led a handful of volunteers to the gym. “If I was on a train that crashed, I would imagine other people would help me in a small town,” she said.

Part of Kingman’s readiness to help stems from a train fire in 1973, when a petroleum tanker exploded, killing 11 volunteer firefighters, including the high school principal and the president of the local utility company.

Kingman residents were all too aware of how easily their town’s shining moment could have turned into a nightmare.

“The upside of this is that we didn’t have to set up a morgue,” said Keith Adams, the city’s recreation supervisor, whose assignment was to deliver ice and mattresses to the gym. “That would have been my job.”

Times staff writers Tom Gorman in Arizona and Matea Gold in Los Angeles and Times wire services contributed to this story.