The president of the Association of Civil Engineers, Canals and Ports and of Civil Engineering, José Trigueros, has directly pointed to the Minister of Transport and Sustainable Mobility, Óscar Puente, as responsible for the accident between an AVE and an Iryo train on the Madrid-Seville line, a crash that has caused at least a dozen deaths.
In statements to Europa Press, Trigueros, who also chaired the Institute of Engineering of Spain (IIE), has strongly criticized the management of the head of Transport at the helm of the country's railway infrastructure.
"It cannot be that our infrastructure is run by incompetent people, who should be dealing with their Ministry and not posting tweets. It is a disgrace how our infrastructure is. I hold the minister responsible," he stated, questioning the lack of rigor and oversight in the maintenance of the network.
Although at first the possibility of human error as the origin of the accident was pointed to, the president of the association has focused on safety protocols and on the system that must prevent this type of failure.
According to what he warned, "if that failure is based on possible human error, that protocol is badly made". "It cannot be that in the 21st century an accident of this nature occurs. I feel ashamed of the lack of maintenance and control," he concluded, underscoring that the ultimate responsibility lies in the design and supervision of the systems.
Trigueros has insisted that "the cause of the accident is none other than one, the failure of the safety system of the line. The failure of the LZB, a safety system that apparently broke down first thing in the morning," pointing to this mechanism as a key element that would not have worked properly.
The engineer has recalled that in high speed the tracks are divided into blocks and that "in which if there is a train stopped in that block another train cannot enter because the signal has to be red". From his point of view, "what is incomprehensible is that the line is resumed" without the protection system being fully operational.
Along these lines, he stressed that the LZB system "failed" early in the morning "and it is supposed that they were restoring the system and trains were beginning to run." In his view, in a high-speed environment "we cannot afford human errors in high speed. If the traffic light is red, the train stops. It cannot be that Spanish high speed becomes the biggest disaster in Europe".
Trigueros has stressed that, even if the driver "runs a red light", the safety system must act immediately: "the system, automatically if it works well, stops the train": "There cannot be two trains in the same block".
For this reason, he maintains that "what has happened is because the train did not stop it, the system should have stopped it. The driver has no fault whatsoever because the train has to stop it", exonerating the driver and attributing the origin of the accident to the system failure and the lack of oversight by the Ministry.