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COSTCO’S HEROES

Shopping center employees spring into action after train wreck

BY ED MCKINLEY

Tragedy brought out the best in the store employees at Franciscan Metro Center, in Glendale, Calif. Just before dawn on Jan. 26, right at the property’s doorstep, there was a collision involving two commuter trains and a freight train that killed 11 people and injured nearly 200.

Thirteen workers from the Costco warehouse store rushed into the chilly, rainy darkness to pull people from the wreckage before the arrival of emergency crews. Using the store’s fire extinguishers, the workers fought to contain the diesel-fed blaze.

More heroism followed. Through the morning and into the afternoon, workers from Starbucks and other stores joined the Costco people. Raiding their own shelves, they doled out bottled water, coffee, first-aid kits, blankets and food to the victims and also to police officers, firefighters and government officials.

Then the center, owned and operated by the Los Angeles-based Festival Cos., turned its 1,000-plus-vehicle parking lot over to emergency crews. The lot teemed with the combined activities of a field hospital, command center, helipad, temporary firehouse, police station and FBI branch, railroad salvage yard, hazardous-materials transfer site and crime-investigation scene. About 75 municipal, county, state and federal agencies set up shop on the blacktop, in tents, trucks, trailers, golf carts and motor homes. A forest of antennas sprouted from a dozen television mobile units crowded into one section of the lot.

Shortly before 6 a.m., a man police later described as a deranged attention-seeker soaked an SUV in gasoline and abandoned it at a track crossing about 20 feet from the Costco. A northbound Metrolink commuter train struck the vehicle, then derailed and smashed into a freight train parked alongside before jackknifing into the path of a southbound train. A 25-year-old Compton, Calif., man was apprehended nearby in connection with the incident.

The crash sounded like thunder to Eddie Robles, a Costco manager four hours into his shift at the time. At first, Robles told SCT, he shrugged off the noise as just another electrical storm of the kind that had been shaking things up in the Valley for a couple of weeks.

Then, he says, he heard the frantic voice of the receiving manager, Roxanne Estrada, on the store’s radio system describing what was going on outside. From where she stood on the loading dock, Estrada told Robles later, she could see the trains sliding on their sides.

By the time Robles and others got out to the tracks, he said, “there was silence, a scary silence.” But soon cries for help began piercing the quiet. “A couple minutes later there was a roar of people screaming for assistance, wanting help,” he recalls. He says he saw Costco employees Hector Martinez and Miguel Lara pull two victims from the cars. Robles wielded a fire extinguisher until that was spent, then grabbed another and continued trying to keep the flames at bay. When those extinguishers were gone, he and his fellows sent for an additional palette load from stock. Robles says they must have emptied about 50 extinguishers.

The authorities arrived minutes later, but not soon enough for Robles. “Every minute that went by was an eternity,” he said.

Likewise, time would take on an unreal quality for Robles’ boss, Kevin Green, the store’s general manager. “I was lying in bed waiting for the alarm to go off when the phone rang,” said Green. It was Estrada, calling to inform him about the wreck. After phoning his own boss, Shawn Parks, a chain vice president, Green turned on his TV and saw that helicopters were already at the site, he says.

By 7 a.m. Green was at the center, overseeing the work of erecting canopies to shield victims and rescuers from the rain. Costco employees helped with minor first aid, as the paramedics and emergency technicians tended to those more seriously injured.

Uninjured train riders were sequestered inside the Costco warehouse store for questioning by detectives investigating the crash, says Green.

Most of the 12 stores in the 290,000-square-foot center had not yet opened at the time of the wreck, and those remained closed for the rest of the day, says John Skillman, the center’s general manager. The following morning the center opened with a third of the lot still clogged with emergency vehicles. Business resumed, though not as usual.

“It was a sad moment, because a lot of people lost their fathers, mothers, uncles, brothers and sisters,” said Robles, “but it was sure nice to see complete strangers helping each other out of the train and walking them to the safe zones set up for them. It’s a moment where you see the human nature of people coming together.”