between injuries and casualties. but clearly we will find out a lot more, jon, in the coming minutes and hours. jon. jon: jonathan hunt reporting from los angeles for us. jonathan, thank you. so yeah, very serious accident as jonathon was just telling us. you can see the evidence of it on the picture, the large picture on your screen right now. that s an amtrak train. its first day of service for the new amtrak cascades line and something went terribly wrong. injuries and casualties as jonathan hunt was just telling us. how many we do not know. interstate 5, a main artery for that part of washington state, is shut down while they deal with this. a public information officer for washington state patrol and joins us now. what can you tell us? do you have any casualty counts? i can t give you information about the scene itself.
on this morning s incident. we do know as tom pointed out this is a commuter train. a lot of excitement going into this first service going from north to south on this cascades line. train 501. alex, were you on the train when it derailed or had you gotten off? reporter: it s one of the craziest moments of my life. we got off ten minutes before. we got off at tacoma, washington. about 10, 15 minutes after we got off, the train we were on derailed.
direction. we are getting more information as the minutes go by here. what we see is this is the cascades line going from seattle to portland. train 501. multiple injuries and casualties reported. we do not have those numbers yet but the local medical center is taking in the injured. we expect to hear from the hospital very soon. we don t know how many people were on the train or how many cars were involved? reporter: we do not have an official count on how many people were on that train this morning. it was celebratory first outing of this service. folks were excited to be riding this train and it took a turn for the worst here. we do know there s about 14 miles along this track that have been upgraded or added as this service was being expanded over the past several months. that is now part of this report
of massive damage in the area. it looks like we re getting some more information now. the people that were in all the vehicles, even though when you see the pictures, nobody in any of the vehicles are a fatal. the fatales are all contained to the train. what caused it to derail will be up to the ntsb. southbound i-5 is completely closed and will be for some time. was there any traffic on the rails before that, around that time? we don t know anything when it comes to the rails yet. what you re seeing is what it is. on the other side of that bridge, there s three or four more cars that are upside down on the road and in the woods. you mentioned there s some people who have been able to walk off the train.
guests that we have had on or reports we ve seen online. we in no way no exactly what happened. these are the reports that we re seeing right now to try to figure out how on this maiden voyage this could have happened to this train. jon: it would fit, melissa, that on a maiden voyage, this is a a big deal for amtrak. they spent $800 million, almost a billion dollars getting ready for this day and it would fit that they would have, you know, kind of a p.r. person on board the train trying to drum up the excitement. that s apparently the person who first put out the word or one of the people who first put out the word they had hit something on the tracks. what looks to be a terrible, terrible accident ensued. with one train car at least one train car down flat on the highway. another one there left dangling with one end of it basically on the road and a second car dangling as well. although not in nearly as precarious a position.