“The line was dancing,” said Joel Ortega, the metro director at the time. That same phrase had been used seven years ago - when city officials grew so concerned about the new subway, known as Line 12, that they shut down part of it in 2014 - only about 17 months after it was inaugurated. The night of the crash, Tania said the metro shook so much “it was like it was dancing.” Slim’s company, including incorrectly poured concrete and missing steel components, according to an unreleased government document from 2017. During an inspection after a major earthquake in 2017, the city found errors in the original construction of the section built by Mr.The metro was certified less than an hour before it was inaugurated, even though thousands of pieces of work had not been completed, according to a 2014 investigation by the city’s Legislative Assembly. Federal auditors found that the city “authorized poor quality work” even as the line was being built.Ebrard eventually moved out of the country for 14 months, leaving behind what he called a “political witch hunt.” The outcry over the problems was so intense that Mr. The scramble led to a frenzied construction process that began before a master plan had been finalized and produced a metro line with defects from the start. In a rush to finish, the city demanded that construction companies open the subway well before Mr.The Times reviewed thousands of pages of internal government and corporate documents on the metro’s troubled history, finding more than a decade of warnings and concerns about safety before the fatal crash. But some engineers working on it say they are encountering problems that are similar to the ones they faced when they built the subway that collapsed. López Obrador that is supposed to revitalize southern Mexico and help cement his legacy as president. Slim’s company is building a significant part of another signature project - Tren Maya, a 950-mile railway championed by Mr. That is one of the primary explanations being considered by Mexico City officials, according to several people familiar with the official investigations into the disaster, and it underscores a pattern of political expediency and haphazard work as the metro was being built. The Times took thousands of photographs of the crash site and shared the evidence with several leading engineers who reached the same conclusion: The steel studs that were vital to the strength of the overpass - linchpins of the entire structure - appear to have failed because of bad welds, critical mistakes that likely caused the crash.
Slim’s construction company, Carso Infrastructure and Construction, built the portion of the line that collapsed - the firm’s first rail project, paving the way for more. Ebrard was mayor of Mexico City when the new metro line, known as the “Golden Line,” was built, a heralded expansion of the second largest subway in the Americas that could boost his credentials for a possible presidential run. 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.