Mayor Bloomberg was in Bermuda on Sunday when a Metro-North train derailed and crashed in the Bronx, killing four people and injuring more than 60 others, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.
The Journal said Bloomberg was golfing Sunday morning at the Mid Ocean golf club, and did not leave until about 12 p.m., according to a person who spotted him.
The train, bound for Grand Central, derailed at about 7:20 a.m. as it rounded a curve near the Spuyten Duyvil station, sending cars onto their sides as it slid down a bank toward the Harlem River. Passengers were thrown out windows, and the cars scraped up dirt and tree branches as they scraped along.
A Bloomberg spokesman declined comment.
The mayor, who visited some of the injured at the hospitals Sunday night, was asked by reporters why he wasn't at the scene, and said "there's nothing I can do."
"What I can do is make sure that the right people from New York City – our police commissioner, our fire commissioner and our emergency management commissioner – are there and that they have all the resources that they want," he said.
"I was briefed a few minutes, probably a half an hour after the train wreck, or the first time that I’d heard about it, and we responded in the ways that I think the city should be proud of our emergency first responders," he added.
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Bloomberg, who leaves office at the end of the month, has refused throughout his 12 years in City Hall to discuss his whereabouts on weekends.
He most notably was criticized when he was not in town at the start of a Christmas weekend snowstorm that paralyzed the city in 2010.
