The president of Adif casts doubt on the Civil Guard's report on Adamuz: "It is not well interpreted"

BarcelonaNew chapter in the investigation to clarify why two trains collided in Adamuz, in the province of Cordoba, on January 18, an accident that caused 46 fatalities. If last week the Civil Guard pointed out that the main hypothesis was a track break that occurred 22 hours before the incident without any Adif system detecting it, this Monday evening the company managing the railway infrastructure in Spain has corrected the police force. Specifically, Adif's president, Pedro Marco, has assured that the Civil Guard did not correctly interpret the technicalities on which it bases its conclusion that the rail was already broken.

"There is such a level of technicality that, obviously, I believe it is not being interpreted correctly," he said at a press conference, alluding to the Civil Guard's report suggesting that Adif's systems detected a voltage drop 22 hours earlier that would explain the rail break. Marco reiterated that this voltage drop comes from a system used exclusively to know where a train is at a given moment, but not to identify track breaks.

"The Civil Guard may have interpreted that this possibility exists, but in reality, there is currently no system for real-time detection of a broken rail. It is a technological debate still unresolved in the railway sector. Therefore, obviously, I must apologize to the Civil Guard because they cannot enter into this debate," he added. Marco also defended the public company's actions after the tragic accident: "We have secured all materials and admit that we have manipulated them, but with the pertinent judicial authorization and only to check the welds."

He also pointed out that the Civil Guard did not take aluminum plates that Adif considered involved in the incident, which is why the company collected them and deposited them with the rest of the material. "We inform the judicial authority of the entire process followed, all documentation, and where these elements are available to them," he stated.

Report

The armed institute, in charge of the investigation of the accident, stated last week in a new report sent to the courts of Montoro (Córdoba) that it could not yet definitively conclude what the causes of the accident were, as there are still procedures and inspections to be carried out. Likewise, the police force explained that a thorough analysis of the tracks at the kilometer where the accident occurred and the diagrams indicating the tension of the tracks had revealed an important detail.

Specifically, the train accident occurred at 7:43 PM on January 18, but 22 hours earlier, on January 17 at 9:46 PM, there was already a drop in electrical tension on the tracks. It went from 2 V to 1.5 V. This means, and the Civil Guard indicated this, that the track breakage occurred almost a day before the accident, as the drop in tension would be an indicator of this rupture. However, it was not yet clear whether the rail or the weld broke first.

The big unknown after this statement from the Civil Guard was why Adif did not detect the breakage or the drop in tension during those hours that passed until the accident. The summary, according to the report, is that Adif's system was not prepared to detect this type of electrical alteration, something that its president corrected this Monday.