Adif on the Alvia accident: "It is difficult to apologize for something for which one does not feel responsible"

Adif's lawyer has defended this Thursday the innocence of Andrés Cortabitarte, former head of security for the company in the Alvia train accident that in 2013 caused 80 deaths and 145 injuries on the outskirts of Santiago de Compostela, has shown its solidarity with the victims and has pointed to the train driver as the only culprit. In the presentation of the definitive conclusions, the representative of Adif has defended that in the public company they are not “neither insensitive, nor cynical nor liars” for defending the innocence of their workers nor do they intend to deceive the prosecutor or the judge and affirmed that it is “difficult to ask for forgiveness for something for which one does not feel responsible”.

In any case, after having listened to the victims in the civil part of the process, in which numerous testimonies have denounced that nobody contacted them and they felt “forgotten”, he regretted that the administration sometimes appears “distant and lacks empathy” and has made him understand that “something could have been done better”..

“I do not know if it is up to me to attribute the representation of the administration, but people feel that we did not show the sensitivity that the circumstances required,” said Adif's lawyer, who had previously shown all the solidarity of the railway sector with the victims.

During his speech, he defended Adif's theses during the trial, that is, Cortabitarte's innocence and the driver's sole responsibility for his “continuous inattention for more than one hundred seconds”, an “unpredictable” risk.

The Adif representative has affirmed that during the trial and before, “a social breeding ground” was generated with “simple” messages that penetrated with great ease among public opinion, such as that “the curve was dangerous”, “that not everything could depend on the driver” and others, with which they were intended to induce prior guilt..

In addition, according to his vision, during the trial it has been proven that there is no evidence against Cortabitarte or Adif, who complied with all the security and risk assessment protocols in force in 2011, the time to give the go-ahead for the commissioning of the road..

What has happened, he has interpreted, is that certain testimonies have tried to analyze with current knowledge and with the security measures in force at this time, which have been implemented, what happened more than a decade ago and which at that time were either not foreseen or their application was “in its infancy”..

And in any case, in addition, these issues would not have prevented the accident from occurring, since the only reason, he has insisted, was “the continuous inattention for more than one hundred seconds” of the driver.

In his speech, for about two and a half hours, Adif's lawyer has ensured that in the trial “the functionality of the Asfa system” of speed control has been accredited, a system on which there is “an unequivocal admitted technical consensus” that the driver is responsible for speed control and whose risks, detected, are “tolerable” and are resolved with “sufficient training of the drivers”.

He has also defended in his definitive conclusions that the curve where the accident occurred “is not unique” in Spain, but that “there are dozens of similar ones in which if the driver does not control the speed a catastrophe can occur” and he has also rejected that the risk at that point was “obvious”, since if it were so it would have been detected in the hundreds of trips in tests.

In his prosecution paper, he has also quantified the damage to the infrastructure caused by the “serious negligence” of the driver at 1.3 million euros.