Community response in crisis

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: a small town comes to the aid of a derailed train. A couple weeks ago, an Amtrak train struck a vehicle and toppled off the rails near a town few people had ever heard of before—the town of Mendon, Missouri.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: What happened next? Well, WORLD’s Josh Schumacher has the story.

JOSH SCHUMACHER, REPORTER: Eric Hoyt is the superintendent of the Northwestern R-1 school district in Mendon, Missouri. On Monday June 27th, he got a phone call he didn’t expect.

HOYT: The 911 Dispatch, and Sheridan county called and told me what was going on…

A train had derailed nearby.

Here’s Corporal Justin Dunn of the Missouri Highway Patrol

DUNN: Approximately 12:43pm Today the Sherman county 911 Center received a 911 call of a vehicle struck by train on Porsche prairie Avenue in Sheridan County, southwest of men in Missouri. At approximately 1302 First Responders began to arrive on the scene.

The 911 dispatch had a request for Eric Hoyt.

HOYT: …and asked if we could organize transportation to the accident scene to remove non injured and minorly wounded passengers from the scene and get them back to our school as kind of an evacuation and holding zone.

Hoyt’s response?

HOYT: I got off the phone with him and started working on organizing drivers.

The passenger train struck a dump truck at a railroad crossing near Mendon. Four people died, and over one-hundred passengers suffered injuries. The railroad crossing was what Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, refers to has a “passive” crossing.

HOMENDY: There are active crossings and passive crossings. What makes this a passive crossing is there was a stop sign and cross books. There were no arms. There were no warning lights. There were no bells.

Three of the school bus drivers were nearby, so they could get to their buses easily. Hoyt himself wasn’t far off, so he headed over to the school as well—then on to the scene.

He started calling other faculty from the school to get on campus and get things ready. One of the basketball coaches had just gotten back from a basketball tournament. He got to the school gym and started gathering food and water.

Here’s Corporal Justin Dunn again.

DUNN:The train had approximately 207 passengers as well as crew members all injured and uninjured occupants of the train had been transported from the scene

By this point, other people in town had heard as well.

MOXLEY: I was just here at home, I'm a teacher. So I was off for the summer home with my boys. And we have an elementary messenger group, and someone had put it in the messenger group that they had heard that there was an Amtrak that had derailed in the Mendon area.

That’s Whitney Moxley—she teaches 4th grade at the town’s K-12 school.

MOXLEY: I just quickly loaded up my boys and took them to my brother-in-law, and then I headed down there just to see with whatever I could help with.

And so she, like Hoyt, just started helping out—wherever she was needed. For Moxley, that meant helping to set up a triage area—making ice packs, and trying to find anything around the school that would be helpful for tending minor injuries. Mostly, they followed the instructions of the EMTs on-scene.

MOXLEY: We would set them in an area and then all the nurses that it came in EMTs, they would assess them, and then those that were okay. And we would kind of get them to a different area and just try to keep them comfortable. And then there were several that had to be put on school buses or ambulance to take to be checked out further.

Uninjured passengers gathered in groups on the bleachers in the school’s gym. Meanwhile, volunteers packed goodie bags to give to the passengers who were leaving for hotels or other places where they’d stay for the night.

Moxley stayed into the night, doing what she could to help out. And that was what a lot of other people from Mendon did that day as well, doing whatever first responders told them to do. Clergy and mental health professionals showed up to talk with distressed passengers. Amtrak workers also began helping passengers find travel accommodations.

MOXLEY: I think that's just what our community does. I just feel like the people in our area, that's how they would respond, they see someone that is in need, and they don't hesitate at all.

The town was laid out in 1871. It shifted locations about a decade later, when the railway came through. The population then was about 350 residents. Currently, it has about 270.

Here’s Eric Hoyt again.

HOYT: I think everybody is just used to helping. It's just a normal response for them. I don't, I feel like everybody around here looks at these instances with a lot of humility. They don't expect notoriety, they don't expect recognition. They just, it's something that they, you know, is in their personalities to do and help and once the event is over with, they'll just go back to life as usual.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher.

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