APPLETON, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – The scouts from Appleton Boy Scout Troops 73 and 12 are still shaken, following Monday’s Missouri Amtrak derailment. Their Amtrak train was traveling 87 mph, when it hit a dump truck at a crossing.
The crash left more than four people dead and more than 100 others injured.
Now, the scouts are home and Thursday, FOX 11 sat down with some of the boys to hear their firsthand account of the moments leading up to the crash, and the aftermath.
The smell of the gasoline and the horrific sound of glass breaking and twisted metal. Just a few of the terrifying things these young Boy Scouts had to experience.
The unimaginable forceful impact threw everything and everyone everywhere.
Eli Skrypczak was sleeping before the collision.
“I woke up, and I was kinda in the middle of the air, but it all kinda happened in slow motion.”
For Dean Seaborne, it would leave him trapped inside a bathroom, unsure of what had just happened, hardly realizing he’s now sitting on what would normally be the top of the train.
“The door was still locked, though, and I couldn’t open it,” he recalled. “I tried, like, with all of my strength. I just couldn’t.”
With seemingly no way out, he had been yelling for help for about 30 minutes, but soon the Boy Scout in him kicked in.
“One of the things I realized pretty quickly is that I’m not the one who really needs help,” Seaborne said. “I started to realize the big picture, like, there’s probably people that are so much more injured; they need to get to them first.”
But with the help of others, the door would eventually be pried open.
“Just seeing a light and knowing that I was okay, it was very relieving,” Seaborne said.
That relief soon turned into instinct and he, along with his fellow scouts, sprang into action.
“Getting people out and calming them down, just going around on the tracks and if someone looked like they were hurt, or they looked like they were shocked, asking them if they’re okay, if they need waterjust making sure everyone got out safely and didn’t have any critical injuries,” said Skrypczak.
Some, doing that in even worse conditions.
“So many of us had actually lost our shoes during the accident,” Henry Gadzik of Boy Scout Troop 73 remembers. “We were running around trying to help people, on the rocks and through oil spills just in socks.”
Troops 73 and 12 had been on their way back from a 10-day trip in New Mexico at one of the Boy Scouts of America’s largest National High Adventure Base. They could’ve never guessed the bond they formed there, nor the skills they obtained would prepare them for this.
“We came back, and we were in this train crash,” Boy Scout Troop 73’s Henry Gadzik said. “Those bonds absolutely sprung into place, and we were able to function so well, and help each other so well as a group, because of the bonds that we had forged between us, prior to this.”
But there’s something to be said about a community coming together in tragedy.
The boys, stuck in a Missouri hotel, learned that quickly, being helped by their own kind.
“Troop Six Missouri, they raised over $1,000 in one night; a couple of hours I think,” Skrypczak said. “They brought us socks, underwear, shirts, food, drinks and lot of pizza!”
Still, the selfless actions of these Appleton scouts are what the Boy Scouts prepared them for.
But to many, they’re no longer just scouts, they’re heroes.
“One thing that’s really annoying me is this whole hero narrative and how people are telling us we’re heroes,” Isaac Burken, another Boy Scout a part of Troop 73 said. “We’re not heroes! First responders, EMTs do this every day.”
Now, even with them all safely back home the healing begins.
While everyone who traveled with the Boy Scouts is expected to make a full recovery, the tragic incident has put things into perspective for most of them, possibly forever changing the way they view things.
The crash left at least four people dead and more than 100 others injured.
