I Want U to Just Say Whatever Is On Your Mind
Two people found in a car buried under tons of debris and wreckage from a train derailment have been identified as a couple from Glenview who lived about a block away.
Friends of the family identified the couple as Burton Lindner, 69 and Zorine Lindner, 70 of the 100 block of Cornell Court in the north suburb. The family is planning legal action, and attorneys for them appeared in court this morning.
Lindner was a lawyer who began his own practice in 1975, according to a biography on his firm's website. He and his wife were found in a crushed black Lexus, 17 hours after salvage crews started to dig through tons of spilled coal, derailed freight hoppers and twisted ruins of a collapsed railroad bridge.
The couple had dinner plans for Wednesday night but had left their home early to spend the afternoon together, according to lawyer Michael LaMonica, whose firm shares office space with Lindner's firm. They were headed south on Shermer Road when the overpass collapsed around 1:45 p.m.
“I know he had talked about going to the Botanical Gardens, but he said not if it was 100 degrees out,” LaMonica said.
The couple typically spent the Fourth of July with their family because they are close-knit, but “it just so happened this time they weren’t with them,” LaMonica said.
He called them “wonderful, generous, compassionate people” who both volunteered for restoration work in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
LaMonica said he worked with Lindner for four years, and called him a close friend and mentor. “Burt was the type of guy who’d come into our office every day and talk. He taught me more than how to be a lawyer. He taught me how to interact with people, how to respect others.”
The couple had two sons and four grandchildren. LaMonica said the family is shocked.
LaMonica and an associate, attorney Erron Fisher, appeared in Daley Center courtroom this morning seeking an emergency order from a judge. “From what we’ve observed, Union Pacific has torn the scene apart. We want to stop that.”
Fisher noted that there was a derailment in the same place in 2009. He said they plan to hire experts and a videographer to go to the scene and find out what they can about what happened.
Meanwhile, authorities have said there could be more victims and, using a crane and other equipment, they continued to search through the wreckage Thursday evening into Friday morning. The derailment on the Glenview-Northbrook border appears to have been caused by tracks warped by heat, railroad officials said.
Officials initially said no one was injured when the 138-car Union Pacific Railroad coal train bound for Wisconsin derailed Wednesday afternoon on a viaduct over Shermer Road near Willow Road. But Thursday morning, crews spotted the bumper of a car and dug around it with shovels.
Workers could be seen clearing off what appeared to be the windshield of a vehicle, then covering the area with a blue tarp. Officials on the scene said one body was inside, and they were working to remove it.
By late afternoon, crews still were trying to determine whether more vehicles were buried in the debris, Glenview fire Chief Wayne Globerger said. Officials from the Cook County medical examiner's office were on the scene.
It is "definitely possible there's more cars," Globerger said. "Keep in mind, we're talking tons (of debris) here."
Shortly before 5 p.m., Globerger confirmed that a second body was found in the car. The driver was a man, he said. But the fire chief could not confirm the sex of the second victim.
The nearly flattened car, with the bodies inside, was loaded onto a flatbed truck and taken to the Cook County medical examiner's office. Work crews remained on the scene looking for signs of any other vehicles.
While the investigation of the derailment continued, extreme heat causing the steel rails to expand between the ties, called a rail kink, was identified as a likely cause of the derailment that led to the subsequent bridge collapse, a Union Pacific spokesman said. The train was en route from Wyoming to an electricity plant in Milwaukee. The bridge is owned and maintained by Union Pacific, officials said.
The investigation, led by the Federal Railroad Administration, is expected to take months, but the sequence of events is now clear, according to Union Pacific officials.
The preliminary investigation has ruled out the failure of the bridge as the cause of the derailment, Union Pacific spokesman Mark Davis said. The 86-foot-long bridge was not designed to carry the cumulative load of 28 derailed coal cars all at once, Davis said. Each car weighs 75 tons to 85 tons on average and up to 100 tons in some cases, he said.
The elevated tracks surrounding the bridge are built on an embankment. The embankment, made from compacted landfill, did not play a role in causing the accident, Davis said.
A Federal Railroad Administration spokesman declined to comment on preliminary findings, referring most questions to Union Pacific officials. "We are in charge of (approving) the track on the bridge, not the bridge itself,'' agency spokesman Michael England said. The agency delegates many inspection duties to the railroads. In the case of the Shermer Road rail overpass, Union Pacific employees inspect the bridge and their report is turned over to the Federal Railroad Administration.
Through Thursday's sweltering heat and an afternoon downpour, Union Pacific crews clad in helmets and orange vests cleared the train's wreckage piece by piece. Black soot from the upended freight of coal covered some workers, who walked from the scene to a nearby water truck to rinse off. Officials estimate the excavation could take days.
Erich Gibbs, who owns a business in the area, said he was driving on Shermer under the bridge about noon Wednesday, less than two hours before the accident, and he saw a worker wearing a colored safety vest walking on the tracks.
"It looked like he was checking something out,'' said Gibbs, 72, of Wilmette. "An hour and a half later, the train .... crushed the bridge.''
Davis confirmed that Union Pacific inspectors and monitoring equipment were on the tracks before the accident checking for possible abnormalities in track gauge or shifting. Such inspections are routinely conducted twice a day during extreme heat or cold, he said.
Because of the "heat order," a 40-mph slow zone order, down from 50 mph normally on that segment of track, was in effect at the time of the accident, Davis said. An event recorder in the locomotive showed that the train was traveling at 37 mph when it derailed, he said.
"We ruled out the bridge failing and then the train derailing (by being driven off the tracks,) based on the discussion with the train crew'' as well as viewing the images from a camera on the train, Davis said.
Copyright © 2012, Chicago Tribune
Friends of the family identified the couple as Burton Lindner, 69 and Zorine Lindner, 70 of the 100 block of Cornell Court in the north suburb. The family is planning legal action, and attorneys for them appeared in court this morning.
Lindner was a lawyer who began his own practice in 1975, according to a biography on his firm's website. He and his wife were found in a crushed black Lexus, 17 hours after salvage crews started to dig through tons of spilled coal, derailed freight hoppers and twisted ruins of a collapsed railroad bridge.
The couple had dinner plans for Wednesday night but had left their home early to spend the afternoon together, according to lawyer Michael LaMonica, whose firm shares office space with Lindner's firm. They were headed south on Shermer Road when the overpass collapsed around 1:45 p.m.
“I know he had talked about going to the Botanical Gardens, but he said not if it was 100 degrees out,” LaMonica said.
The couple typically spent the Fourth of July with their family because they are close-knit, but “it just so happened this time they weren’t with them,” LaMonica said.
He called them “wonderful, generous, compassionate people” who both volunteered for restoration work in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
LaMonica said he worked with Lindner for four years, and called him a close friend and mentor. “Burt was the type of guy who’d come into our office every day and talk. He taught me more than how to be a lawyer. He taught me how to interact with people, how to respect others.”
The couple had two sons and four grandchildren. LaMonica said the family is shocked.
LaMonica and an associate, attorney Erron Fisher, appeared in Daley Center courtroom this morning seeking an emergency order from a judge. “From what we’ve observed, Union Pacific has torn the scene apart. We want to stop that.”
Fisher noted that there was a derailment in the same place in 2009. He said they plan to hire experts and a videographer to go to the scene and find out what they can about what happened.
Meanwhile, authorities have said there could be more victims and, using a crane and other equipment, they continued to search through the wreckage Thursday evening into Friday morning. The derailment on the Glenview-Northbrook border appears to have been caused by tracks warped by heat, railroad officials said.
Officials initially said no one was injured when the 138-car Union Pacific Railroad coal train bound for Wisconsin derailed Wednesday afternoon on a viaduct over Shermer Road near Willow Road. But Thursday morning, crews spotted the bumper of a car and dug around it with shovels.
Workers could be seen clearing off what appeared to be the windshield of a vehicle, then covering the area with a blue tarp. Officials on the scene said one body was inside, and they were working to remove it.
By late afternoon, crews still were trying to determine whether more vehicles were buried in the debris, Glenview fire Chief Wayne Globerger said. Officials from the Cook County medical examiner's office were on the scene.
It is "definitely possible there's more cars," Globerger said. "Keep in mind, we're talking tons (of debris) here."
Shortly before 5 p.m., Globerger confirmed that a second body was found in the car. The driver was a man, he said. But the fire chief could not confirm the sex of the second victim.
The nearly flattened car, with the bodies inside, was loaded onto a flatbed truck and taken to the Cook County medical examiner's office. Work crews remained on the scene looking for signs of any other vehicles.
While the investigation of the derailment continued, extreme heat causing the steel rails to expand between the ties, called a rail kink, was identified as a likely cause of the derailment that led to the subsequent bridge collapse, a Union Pacific spokesman said. The train was en route from Wyoming to an electricity plant in Milwaukee. The bridge is owned and maintained by Union Pacific, officials said.
The investigation, led by the Federal Railroad Administration, is expected to take months, but the sequence of events is now clear, according to Union Pacific officials.
The preliminary investigation has ruled out the failure of the bridge as the cause of the derailment, Union Pacific spokesman Mark Davis said. The 86-foot-long bridge was not designed to carry the cumulative load of 28 derailed coal cars all at once, Davis said. Each car weighs 75 tons to 85 tons on average and up to 100 tons in some cases, he said.
The elevated tracks surrounding the bridge are built on an embankment. The embankment, made from compacted landfill, did not play a role in causing the accident, Davis said.
A Federal Railroad Administration spokesman declined to comment on preliminary findings, referring most questions to Union Pacific officials. "We are in charge of (approving) the track on the bridge, not the bridge itself,'' agency spokesman Michael England said. The agency delegates many inspection duties to the railroads. In the case of the Shermer Road rail overpass, Union Pacific employees inspect the bridge and their report is turned over to the Federal Railroad Administration.
Through Thursday's sweltering heat and an afternoon downpour, Union Pacific crews clad in helmets and orange vests cleared the train's wreckage piece by piece. Black soot from the upended freight of coal covered some workers, who walked from the scene to a nearby water truck to rinse off. Officials estimate the excavation could take days.
Erich Gibbs, who owns a business in the area, said he was driving on Shermer under the bridge about noon Wednesday, less than two hours before the accident, and he saw a worker wearing a colored safety vest walking on the tracks.
"It looked like he was checking something out,'' said Gibbs, 72, of Wilmette. "An hour and a half later, the train .... crushed the bridge.''
Davis confirmed that Union Pacific inspectors and monitoring equipment were on the tracks before the accident checking for possible abnormalities in track gauge or shifting. Such inspections are routinely conducted twice a day during extreme heat or cold, he said.
Because of the "heat order," a 40-mph slow zone order, down from 50 mph normally on that segment of track, was in effect at the time of the accident, Davis said. An event recorder in the locomotive showed that the train was traveling at 37 mph when it derailed, he said.
"We ruled out the bridge failing and then the train derailing (by being driven off the tracks,) ba
Copyright © 2012, Chicago Tribune
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