Mother describes escape from monorail

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most e-mailed articles

Related stories Blaze makes catwalks necessary on new monorail, fire marshal says

Editor's note: In a dramatic photograph taken during Monday's monorail fire and published on Page One of yesterday's Seattle Times, an unidentified woman held her young daughter while leaning on the outside of one of the trains. She's Kelye Stowell Richards, 40, a Bellevue kindergarten teacher and single mother of two, who e-mailed her thoughts to The Times at 3 a.m. yesterday morning. Some excerpts:

I suggested to my son that we sit up front by the driver so he could see out the window as we rode. The train inched forward, and after we had been traveling for about 10 seconds it stopped without explanation from the driver. "Oh my gosh!" I said to my friend. "There is smoke back there."

No one wanted to say anything, but I knew the same thoughts were racing through all of our minds. We were 40 feet up [actual height is approximately 25 feet] in the air with no way down in a burning train that was gradually filling up with smoke. The doors and windows were sealed from my vantage point, and I couldn't see any way of breaking them and trying to get out.

The passengers were calling to each other to move toward the front of the train. People began to cough, and adults who had maintained their composure up until then began to cry and call out.

Why us? Why this train? Was it a terrorist act or a malfunction of the train? I was scared to death. I couldn't help but be reminded of the people in New York on September 11 who were trapped in burning buildings, and hanging from window ledges to try to breathe. I called my parents and told them we were stuck on the train.

The doors slid open after what seemed like forever, as people crouched down low so as to avoid breathing the smoke. I tapped the man in front of me on the shoulder (and asked) if he would take care of my son. He grabbed my son and tried to pull him toward the floor as my son clung to him and cried. My son held tight to the blue plastic balloon sword that a clown had made for him at the Folklife Festival.

I told him that he had to let it go in order to use his hands to keep himself safe when it was time to get off that train. I will never forget the imagery of seeing that blue balloon sword, a symbol of powerlessness, floating down from the open door of the train.

I held my daughter in my arms and lunged toward the open door. I positioned her on my left hip so as to expose her to as much clean air as possible, and hung her as far as I could outside the train.

There was a small groove on the outside edge of the monorail that I positioned my shoe into. I knew the train was full of people who were all gasping for breath, and yet I couldn't see a soul. I tried to hold onto the handrail with my left hand for a moment in order to reach inside the train for my son's hand. I screamed his name and lunged my hand in, but each time I simply grabbed at the blinding smoke. I screamed to the fireman down below the monorail tracks, "Help us!"

The thought had crossed my mind that if I had to jump, or drop my daughter to the ground I would, rather than lose my life on the burning train. I eyed a table full of T-shirts that someone was selling down below, and wondered what likelihood I might have of aiming for and landing on the table of T-shirts.

Finally the ladder reached our train, and a fireman scrambled up it. I thrust my daughter into his arms the minute he arrived. I climbed down the ladder as quickly as I could while shaking from head to toe. The man who had taken care of my son on the train, and his wife, brought us water and gave the kids some Life Saver candy. They told me they were from Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Thank God for the gift of kind strangers when you need them.

When we arrived at the hospital my blood pressure was 155 over 104, and it is usually very low. The kids and I all had blood samples taken to check for carbon-monoxide poisoning, the doctors checked our lungs, and because I was raspy, I had a chest X-ray done. They gave a small meal to the kids of juice, graham crackers, and a sandwich, which they mostly picked at.

My daughter looked up at me from the two hospital beds that they had pushed together so that I would lay between the kids, and told me, "Mommy, there was a witch on the train." She remembered the black smoke she saw when the Wicked Witch of the West melted on "The Wizard of Oz." Both kids got to keep a bean-shaped nausea bowl to cover with stickers and (part of) their oxygen masks.

"That sense of powerlessness and claustrophobia may stay with me for a long time. I will have to give it some more thought before I ride [the monorail]."