'An absurdity' to blame human error: Spain's deadly train crash 'should never' have happened

For more on this story, we can bring in Professor Francisco Badia, Professor of Engineering at Nebria University, and he's also a railway certification expert. Thank you so much for joining us on the program today. What, in your opinion, went wrong yesterday? Thank you, Delano. Thank you for inviting me. Well, you know, a chain of events, a chain of things, which at the end of the day are related to the responsibility of the administrator of the infrastructure, which is the one that supposed to manage the infrastructure the safety and all of these things so we don't have this type of this type of tragedies uh i'm gonna explain a little bit if you want me about the the context you know we the railway system in spain as in france it is not local it is related to the european union the european normatives there are safety systems that have been very well verified that there are multiple systems are redundant so you don't depend on only one system so the possibility of everything failing is extremely unlikely the system has been designed in a way that this type of accidents should never happen this is something that might have been happening a hundred years ago so so from what you're telling me that there's a chain of events, there is no one person who is responsible. No, obviously. It bears the absurdity to say that one operator at the control center made a decision and the whole system was depending on one person. The system, the normative has been designed and the safety system have been in place, taking into consideration that humans can make mistakes. One of the systems, for example, limits the the what a driver can do you cannot just take the the the fact that the driver will drive properly would not fall asleep would not make mistakes and there's almost it's almost impossible if these systems are in place and functioning that you would have this not not even these systems are modern automatic systems the train track should have these really old systems that tell where a train is. These systems come from. They initially were developed in the 1872. We are talking about more than roughly 150 years since these safety systems exist and they've been in place. Obviously they've been improved but if all of these things that should have been in place the chances of an operator sending a train and not visualizing that that train was in a collision course not to mention that the systems stopping automatically that train or somebody in the control room which we know we're talking about one individual. There's never one individual in a control center. There's a whole group of people. There's a whole procedure, there are protocols. It is it is basically an absurdity to say that it depends on one person and one human mistake Francisco, we have seen um the automation of various sectors. Uh obviously artificial intelligence has been playing a role. Is this the case for trains too as well? Not, not as far as I know and basically you you know you cannot make mistakes so you cannot rely the systems on artificial intelligence. Uh the problem that we probably encounter here. We have here you have the administration of the infrastructures. There are normally governmental, governmental companies. They're all the state-owned companies. Sorry, they're huge like the case of CNCF in France, SNCF, and the case of Adif in Spain and in other countries. They have basically the same structure. At the end of the day, all of this normative, all of these safety measures, all of these things rely on them to do the proper maintenance, to apply the proper safety systems and make sure those systems are working. I would say, in a way, somebody is responsible to put a brake on your car and they have to make sure that that brake is working. But if that brake hasn't been placed properly, you have no option and there's nothing you can do until you have an accident. You mentioned that in Spain, the rail network needs to abide by European norms. Given that rail workers in the country are on strike today, they're maintaining their walkout a day after this crash, what are they asking for? why has there not been investment in the sector like they're saying well that's the part of the problem that you know as a case in France CNCB being a state-owned company in this case a DIF you don't have access to the information you it's not that easy to go and ask and you know can i check this can i say this it's not easy to process a complaint is everything is a little bit more complicated also they are these are huge companies in spain we have roughly 14 000 workers so all of this is very complicated the workers have been complaining for a while before when it happened the previous accident for conditions safety things at the end of the day you know the the safety procedures and the protocols and everything go relies on somebody signing a document somebody normally will sign that document after the job was done but if you don't have these mechanisms to make sure the job was properly done and then a document was signed you actually have a document that tells you everything is fine but in reality things are not fine because nothing has been properly done before and that is the bottom part and that will be a very complicated thing for Spain to fix, because due to the magnitude and the type of these companies, it's not something that you can fix within a month or within two months. Francisco, we're going to have to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us on the program with your expertise today. Thank you very much.