Witness says Disney monorail crash was “head-on”

ORLANDO, Fla. — A witness to the monorail accident that killed a train operator at Walt Disney World over the weekend described it as “a head-on collision” between two trains in a 911 call released Monday.

“A monorail was waiting to come into the station … or it did not leave the station, and the other one cleared through the station, and there was a head-on collision,” the male caller said.

The accident occurred as the park resort was closing early Sunday and one train was being transferred off the rail line, said Zoraya Suarez, a Disney spokeswoman. She declined to describe the circumstances of the crash further.

Austin Wuennenberg, 21, died of multiple traumatic injuries in what’s being considered an accident, said Sheri Blanton, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office in Orlando.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration said Monday it will investigate whether workplace safety rules were broken before one monorail train crashed into another, said Mike D’Aquino, a spokesman in Atlanta for the federal agency. The investigation could take as long as six months.

If citations are issued, Disney World could be fined thousands of dollars. The Orange County Sheriff’s Office in Orlando also is investigating the death.

In another 911 call, a male Disney worker described hearing “a big bang.”

“There’s an issue with the monorail. Something happened,” the caller said. “We just heard a loud bang and my manager ran in and told me to call you.”

The monorail system, which shuttles thousands of visitors around the sprawling resort each day, was shut down Sunday but Disney officials reopened it to visitors Monday afternoon. Workers performed test runs on the system earlier in the day.

Suarez said extra measures to verify that the track switches are operating properly have been put into place, although she refused to be more specific.

“All I can say is there are additional verifications,” she said. “We’ve supplemented our safety procedures and protocol.”

No guests were seriously injured in the first fatal accident in the 38-year history of the park’s monorail.

The medical examiner’s office won’t issue a final report on Wuennenberg’s death until it finishes toxicology tests, which are standard in any unexpected death, Blanton said.

Wuennenberg was a computer science student at Stetson University in nearby DeLand. Friends said he scheduled his classes around his Disney job.

Each train in the monorail system is run manually by the operator and must keep roughly 300 yards apart from each other. If a train gets too close to another, the train will automatically shut down and the operator will be replaced at the next stop, said Joseph Humphrey, a 30-year-old former Walt Disney World monorail operator, who stopped working at the resort in 2004.

A train operator has an emergency stop button at hand which can halt a train, as well as a button that can override the computer and allow the train to continue.

“For this accident to have occurred, one of two things had to happen,” Humphrey said. “Either the computers had to have catastrophically just failed or someone had to have engaged an override button.”