I’m sure by now that most of you have heard of the tragedy at Walt Disney World late last night. At around 2 AM, a monorail crashed into the back of another near Epcot’s station. The driver of the monorail unfortunately passed away. There was a family on one of the monorails who, fortunately, were not injured.

For more on the story, check out CNN.com’s coverage.

Click Orlando also has a video from an eyewitness, and several photos, but I must warn you, they are very upsetting.

I would like to take this time to say that our thoughts and prayers are with the family of the Cast Member who lost his life last night.

This sort of accident has never happened at any Disney theme park before, so it brings up a lot of questions. Disney is very regimented in their safety features for all of their attractions, especially the monorail, so one has to wonder what went wrong.

The monorail is equipped with several safety features that can be used in order to prevent something like this from happening. They all have the standard equipment like most major transportation systems do: communications and navigation system (which is similar to an air traffic control tower), front and rear headlights, and a horn.

On top of that, each monorail has a fail-safe computer system that kicks in, effectively shutting down the monorails’ computerized operating systems, when they come too close to each other.

There a few reasons why this tragedy may have happened. There very well may have been some sort of equipment failure, and the fail-safe didn’t work properly. Being as how it was so late at night, the monorail driver may have been suffering from exhaustion. He may have even had a health problem of some sort, such as going into cardiac arrest, which prevented him from stopping in time. At this time, however, there is no conclusive reason why this occurred.

Officials did not release the name of the Cast Member, but Mike Griffin, Walt Disney World Vice President of Public Affairs, released the following statement:

Today, we mourn the loss of our fellow cast member. Our hearts go out to his family and to those who have lost a friend and co-worker. The safety of our guests and cast members is always our top priority. The monorail is out of service and we will continue to work closely with law enforcement to determine what happened and the approximate next steps.

While some people may be adverse to riding the monorail system from now on, please realize that this is a true rarity, and Disney does take everyone’s safety very seriously. I imagine that there will be some new systems and rules that will be put into effect in the following days, to try to make the monorail even safer.

In any event, this is a truly tragic event, and our thoughts go out to the Cast Member’s family.

UPDATE: Orange County authorities have identified the monorail driver as 21-year old Austin Wenneberg. Our thoughts are with Mr. Wenneberg’s family.