Spain Train Crash: Two Cal Poly Students Confirmed Injured, Toll Holds at 69 With Six Unaccounted For

Since the Oct. 28 collision near Urda that killed at least 69 people, the list of affected families has widened. Cal Poly San Luis Obispo confirmed that two of its students studying abroad were aboard one of the trains and were injured.

University spokesman Matt Lazier said both students are receiving medical care and that the school is in touch with their families, the U.S. Embassy and study-abroad partners in Spain. Cal Poly has not named either student or described the second student's condition.

The student the family has identified

A fundraiser organized by her aunt, Rachel Chernin, names one of them: Leah Silver-Fajardo, a 21-year-old junior from Seattle who spent the semester studying in Florence, Italy.

According to Chernin's posts, Silver-Fajardo suffered a broken knee, pelvis, femur and several ribs, plus bruised lungs, scrapes and burns. She has had knee surgery and is waiting on a second operation to repair her pelvis.

Doctors found the broken femur only after she was moved out of intensive care, Chernin wrote in a Saturday update. Pain control has been difficult because morphine is causing side effects.

The U.S. Embassy told her parents, Nicole and Sergio, that she had been on one of the trains. For a time they did not know whether she was alive or where she had been taken. Friends from her study-abroad program went hospital to hospital until they found her, according to the family.

Her parents and her sister Hannah have since traveled to Spain. The family says both parents left their jobs and Hannah stepped away from her final year of law school.

The fundraiser's goal was $60,000 on Saturday, when it had raised more than $51,000. By Monday morning, Nov. 2, the goal stood at $110,000 and more than $91,000 had been raised. The family says her study-abroad program is paying immediate medical bills and plans to cover her trip home once she is cleared to travel.

Where the casualty count stands

Spanish authorities say 54 of the dead were Spanish nationals. Four Americans and one Canadian are among the dead, and their identities had not been made public as of Monday. One person each has been identified from France, Japan, Argentina, Mexico, Portugal, Tunisia and the Czech Republic.

Three bodies remain unidentified. Three people are still reported missing: two Australians and one person from Japan. About 100 people were injured, according to the latest tally.

What officials have said about the cause

Transport Minister Óscar Puente has laid the crash at the feet of Spain's central train command center. He called its order "inexplicable."

Puente said a computer malfunction knocked out the security system on a 63-kilometer (39-mile) stretch at 8:30 a.m., which halted every train on it. The command center then told the RENFE train to start moving again without speed restrictions, he said. It hit the stopped IRYO train at 8:53 a.m.

That train, Puente said, should never have been released while a stop signal was still active. At minimum, he said, it should have been ordered to go slowly. He said the engineers were not to blame.

Authorities were still working out the RENFE train's speed, which Puente said could have been 200 kph (124 mph) on that flat stretch of track. "I am not attributing responsibility to anyone, I am just stating the facts," he said.

The RENFE train carried 397 passengers and the IRYO train 147, according to officials. The front of the RENFE train and the tail of the IRYO train derailed.

The political stakes

Trains from the same two operators, state-owned RENFE and private IRYO, were involved in a deadly crash in southern Spain in January. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said at the scene that it is "unacceptable for a country like Spain to suffer two high-speed rail accidents in the same year." He called for stronger safety measures to restore confidence in a system that was once a source of national pride.

Sánchez faces a general election on Nov. 29, 27 days from today.

Still unclear is who authorized the restart at the command center and why. Puente has described the order but has not named who gave it, and the speed data that would show how much faster the train was going than it should have been is still being analyzed.