minutes so you can help get yourself out of where you are. thank you for helping us understand. thank you. thanks patrick murphy former congressman, remarkably from the area in which the train crash happened tonight, that remarkable anecdote that he just told in terms of having the first fire captain arrive. congressman murphy helping us to understand what is happening tonight. we re going to stay on this in terms of the basics what we know is 243 people were on board this train. you can see how mangled the train cars are. five amtrack crew among those 243 were told by philadelphia mayor michael nutter that there are at least five fatalities tonight. we re told there are six critical injuries. somewhere between 43 and 53
an amtrack ticket they will honor it and get you from penn station or metro park up and down the line that they can get you to. they will help you out. all right. this is the first car. you can see that the track is clearly bent mangled, actually. the front of the train, which you can t really see because it s so dark as we have been mentioning, light is a true issue out there tonight. there is not a lot of light around it. they have set up some floodlights. they are asking police helicopters and otherwise to shed lights on this. as you can see sort of at the head of this train, it is just mangled and you can see the damage to the tracks and you can also see that this one car and there are about seven or eight that derailed there are no
i want to show everybody a picture. there is a train that is literally bent in half. see, you that brings to my attention a study conducted by the railroad association as a result of a side collision with a truck out in arizona, as i recall. and the study demonstrated that the side impacts on amtrack cars shows that it cannot withstand any kind of direct impact. so what we have here is from being looking at your tv screen another car must have struck the side of this car or that s the only explanation i can think
there was such a violent derailment just outside philadelphia. milissa? we want to go back and listen to this helicopter from our local affiliate. making sure that the people who were injured are getting the proper treatment as necessary and just going at this one step at a time. but you do see a lot of train activity in this area in this one little section here in port richmond. all right. we understand that there are a lot of people that might be stranded tonight? reporter: yes. a lot of people are stranded tonight. northeast corridor on amtrack is completely suspended but new jersey transit is jumping in and is going to help out. they are going to if you have
what they are seeing. a lot of lights have been brought in. when we first got to this scene, we saw passengers about deep bruises, with cuts broken arms and legs countless stretchers and ambulances. here s what some of the passengers we talked to said about the moment of impact when the train derailed. we are listening to local coverage in philadelphia about the amtrack crash that happened just a couple of hours ago. the local northeast regional train number 188 on its way from washington, d.c., to new york city derailed just outside of philadelphia after stopping at the philly main station. it was on its way to new york city s penn station and then onward and upward. the northeast corridor is now shut down to the thousands and thousands of passengers that use amtrack. we were told 238 passengers and 5 crew member were on board at