MOBILE, Ala. – In the dark of night, three travelers advanced inexorably toward tragedy.
Accompanied by her parents on her first train trip, 11-year-old Andrea Chancey couldn’t sleep despite the steady rocking of the Amtrak coach. Aboard the same train after missing a flight, Ken Ivory lounged nearby. Miles away, Willie C. Odom steered a towboat as it pushed barges up a river that was getting foggier by the mile.
In this Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2018, photo, Andrea Chancey looks out her kitchen window, in Biloxi, Miss. Chancey was known as the “miracle child” more than two decades earlier, the girl with cerebral palsy who survived Amtrak’s worst tragedy, even though her parents were killed when the transcontinental train the family was on, tumbled off a bridge into a south Alabama bayou, in 1993. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)A bump. A whoosh. A ball of fire.
Suddenly, those three and more than 200 other people were caught up in what remains the deadliest accident in Amtrak history, the derailment of the Los Angeles- to-Miami Sunset Limited in a south Alabama bayou in 1993. Forty-seven people died and more than 100 others were hurt.
Nearly 25 years later, the survivors remember that night vividly: “I smell the oil. I see the fire. I hear the screaming,” said Chancey, now 36.