The disaster has already spiraled into a political crisis, threatening to ensnare two of the nation’s most powerful figures: the president’s foreign secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, and one of the world’s wealthiest businessmen, Carlos Slim. “The humble, hard-working, good people understand that, unfortunately, these things happen,” he said during a news conference on Tuesday.īut a New York Times investigation - based on years of government records, interviews with people who worked on the construction, and expert analysis of evidence from the crash site - has found serious flaws in the basic construction of the metro that appear to have led directly to its collapse.

Soon after, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, who positions himself as a champion of the poor and an enemy of the elite, apologized to the victims’ families and urged patience while officials examined what went wrong, and who was to blame.

Above her hospital bed is a photo of her 22-year-old sister Nancy - one of 26 people who died in the metro crash that night. Tania now spends her days in the hospital, unable to walk, her shattered pelvis held together by a metal contraption, four screws poking out of each side of her body. As she pulled, she said, she discovered they were the entrails of another passenger. When Tania came to, her neck was wedged between the doors of the metro, her head poking out of the wreckage, the smell of blood curling into her nostrils.īodies strewn on top of her, her outstretched hands felt what seemed to be the straps of her sister’s backpack. Suddenly, she heard a loud bang, then screams, as the overpass collapsed and the train plummeted about 40 feet to the street below.

Mexico city airport bridge collapse